On Wednesday, doctors treating one of those women in the NY area announced the heartbreaking news that her child – a girl and the first to be born to a Zika-infected mother on the US mainland – has severe birth defects.
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Health officials in New Jersey said a baby girl born on Tuesday, to a mother who was infected with the Zika virus, has severe microcephaly.
At Hackensack University Medical Center, where the infant was born Dr. Abdulla Al-Khan said they have a multidisciplinary team to assist the infant and mother. She sent a blood sample to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that the woman was infected with the Zika virus, according to the local paper, The Record.
The current outbreak of Zika has been strongly linked to microcephaly, a birth defect in which babies are born with abnormally small heads and severe brain damage, as well as other neurological conditions in adults including Guillain-Barre syndrome that can trigger paralysis.
In early February, the first case of the Zika virus infection contracted through sexual transmission was identified in the U.S. The case involved a patient in Texas who had sexual relations with a man who had recently traveled to Venezuela. They advised her to have the baby as soon as possible.
“In New Jersey, women say, ‘I’m pregnant, can I go to the pool and am I going to be at risk?’ ” he said. Doctors in Honduras suspected intracranial complications with the unborn child, but it was not until she was admitted to the high-risk unit at the New Jersey hospital that doctors confirmed the microcephaly diagnosis.
For the first time since the beginning of the global epidemic, the White House is taking steps to clarify how existing state funding can be used to fight the disease at a time when it says it is short more than $1 billion to fight the disease nationally. The condition is caused by the Zika virus and this is the first reported Zika-virus-linked birth defect in the continental United States.
Microcephaly is a birth defect wherein a baby’s head is smaller than expected compared with other babies of the same sex and age. She told doctors in Hackensack on Friday that “something is wrong with my baby’s brain”, Alvarez said.
“I told my gynecologist that I had an allergic episode”, she told Fox News from her hospital bed at Hackensack University Medical Center. Has your partner? There are two ways to contract Zika, that health care officials are aware of now, according to the CDC, through a mosquito bite or from a sex partner infected with Zika. In the run-up to the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, some athletes are speaking out about the potential threat the Zika virus poses to those competing this summer.
The Zika virus is transmitted through the bite of infected Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
To lessen the number of Zika infections, the World Health Organization has warned women who have visited a country where the virus is prevalent to wait for about eight weeks before they attempt to get pregnant.
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Honduras is among at least a half a dozen Latin American and Caribbean countries that outlaw abortion with no exceptions, not even to save a woman’s life, according to reproductive rights advocacy groups. The CDC claims 591 people have been diagnosed with Zika in the United States and each case has been related to traveling overseas.
