“Pregnant women who are tested positive for Zika will be referred by their doctors to an obstetric or maternal-foetal medicine specialist for counselling and subsequent follow-up”, Mr Gan said.
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Of the six local cases, four are associated with the ongoing active transmission in Miami Beach, the release explained. But in some cases when patients are very sick, “they often have a lot of diarrhea” and the virus could have spread through that exposure, Dunn said.
The virus can greatly affect an infected pregnant woman and the child that she is carrying.
There now is no vaccine or medication to cure Zika.
Two more cases of Zika virus have been documented by the Department of Health in Iloilo City, bringing to eight the total number of cases in the Philippines since 2012, DOH Secretary Paulyn Ubial said yesterday. After a thorough investigation, health officials remained unclear about how the virus spread. The son kissed and hugged his dying father and helped care for him in a hospital but didn’t travel to an affected area or have sex with anyone who did.
“Ironically, the National Birth Defects Prevention Network (NBDPN) in the U.S. made the decision to discontinue annual reporting of microcephaly by state … because of extreme variability in state level prevalence reports, and microcephaly was not included among the conditions in the most recent report of USA national prevalence estimates”, Kirby said.
Because the father had such a high level of the virus in his body – one of the highest scientists have seen – it’s also likely that the virus showed up in more places in his body, increasing the risk of transmission. Infection during pregnancy is believed to result in babies with small heads a condition called microcephaly and other brain defects.
The researchers also said their findings prove without a doubt that the Zika virus crosses the placenta from a mother to the brain of the fetus.
In addition, the Zika virus can be sexually transmitted and the virus can persist for an extended period of time in the semen of infected males.
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Singapore, Sep 13: At least 48,000 gravitraps – which trap female mosquitoes – will be placed around Singapore by the end of 2016, said the country’s Minister of Environment and Water Resources Masagos Zulkifli on Tuesday in Parliament.
