This brings the statewide number of Zika infections to 22, state health department officials said.
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Professor Jimmy Whitworth from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says that while the research can not prove the link between microcephaly and Zika, it “does strengthen the body of evidence that Zika virus is the cause of fetal microcephaly in Brazil”.
If you travel to a country where Zika is active, you can prevent mosquito bites by using insect repellent, wearing long-sleeved shirts and long trousers, and removing standing water where mosquitoes live and breed. Though the virus poses little threat to the overall population, pregnant women who contract the disease are giving birth to babies with abnormally small heads and underdeveloped brains.
The minister said that he met with USA officials to discuss cooperating on – within one year – developing a vaccine against the virus and therapy to treat people who contract Zika.
The World Bank said on Thursday it is making $150 million in financing immediately available to help combat the Zika virus outbreak in affected Latin American and Caribbean countries.
The bank’s economic forecasts, however, assume that the worldwide response to the Zika outbreak will be swift and well-coordinated and that the most significant health risks are for pregnant women.
Many scientists believe Zika, a mosquito-borne disease that is now sweeping through the Americas, may be a risk factor for microcephaly in newborns, as well as for a serious neurological disorder in adults called Guillain-Barre syndrome.
“Previous studies have identified Zika virus in the saliva, breast milk, and urine of mothers and their newborn babies, after having given birth”.
Aedes aegypti mosquitos travel for example in old auto tires, which are traded across the globe. Only two of the country’s 27 states have not reported cases. “We’ve seen similar post-infection complications after many different infections, including some that are quite similar to Zika”.
Since Philpott said the infected people couldn’t possibly get the disease through local transmission, the question about sexual transmission was raised.
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As part of WHO’s new emergency programme, the agency’s headquarters activated an Incident Management System to oversee the global response and leverage expertise from across the organization to address the crisis.
