Some 157 pregnant women in the United States and another 122 in U.S. territories, primarily Puerto Rico, have tested positive for infection with the Zika virus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.
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There are a total of 544 reported cases of Zika in the United States and presumably 279 of those cases are pregnant women.
Pregnant women are considered to be at greater risk from the virus due to recent research establishing a link between an outbreak of Zika in Brazil and a concurrent spike in microcephaly, a birth defect in which a child is born with an underdeveloped brain and an abnormally small head.
World Health Organization warned that as a first step, these countries should heighten risk communication to pregnant women to raise awareness of complications and promote protection steps to avoid mosquito bites as well as sexual transmission.
– There has been a dramatic jump in the number of pregnant women in the USA infected with the Zika virus.
Initially, doctors recognized the connection between the virus and birth defects only in women who had suffered symptoms during pregnancy.
CDC researchers did not include details about the outcomes of any of the pregnancies they now are monitoring, saying that information “will be shared in future reports”.
Zika is an infectious virus transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito and is connected to brain damage and physical development problems in new born babies, this condition is known as microcephaly. So far, over 270 women in the United States and Puerto Rico have been tested positive for Zika infection.
“We’ve learned a lot in the last four months”, said Margaret Honein, a top official at the CDC’s National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.
Common symptoms of Zika virus include fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis (red eyes), but not everyone experiences symptoms.
The House, meanwhile, passed a bill that redirects $622 million from the Ebola fight in West Africa and other health programs to the Zika fight.
“Add that up. It doesn’t take a lot of cases for you to get to $1.9 billion”.
“Our main goal is to prevent it from getting into our mosquito population”. The funding bill with the most support right now sets aside a little more than $1 billion.
“If I’m a young family right now, or somebody who’s thinking about starting a family, this is just a piece of insurance that I want to purchase”, Obama said, urging Americans to tell their lawmakers to boost funding.
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The president also said that all of the 500 cases diagnosed in the US all are “travel related”, – or contracted elsewhere and brought via the infected person to the U.S.
