Howard County health officials are preparing for potential dangers posed by Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that prompted the World Health Organization to declare an global public health emergency last month. Researchers have identified the mechanism on how the virus infects cells in the brain. Though the link between the two is being established by various groups of health agencies and experts, a team of USA scientists may have the answer to how the virus destroys cells important to fetal brain development.
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It’s also providing the strongest evidence yet of microcephaly in Zika virus patients.
The new work provides experimental evidence that once the virus reaches the developing brain, it can infect and harm cells that are key for further brain development, said Hengli Tang of Florida State University, a lead author of the work.
The study was published in the online version of The New England Journal of Medicine. The study was performed by researchers from Florida State University, Johns Hopkins University, and Emory University.
The researchers tested Zika’s effect on these cells using a Zika virus stock grown in mosquito cells, to replicate the means by which the virus infects human beings.
Researchers in Brazil evaluated 88 women who visited a clinic in Rio de Janeiro, 72 of whom had tested positive positive for Zika.
The physician said that’s because many people who live in the Bay Area travel to areas where Zika is prevalent, including countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean.
In the study, they looked at the way Zika impacts the cortical neural progenitor cells, in comparison with how it affects two other cell types: immature neurons and induced pluripotent stems cells.
In what has been hailed as a major breakthrough, scientists have announced they believe they understand how the Zika virus causes a rare birth defect in which babies are born without abnormally large heads and underdeveloped brains.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who did not participate in the research, agreed that the study doesn’t prove a link.
Brazil was first to sound the alarm on the apparent link with birth defects.
The case studies of the three newborns come a few weeks after Colombia reported a “probable” case of microcephaly in an aborted fetus. Other types of fetal cells injected with the virus were unaffected, suggesting that Zika specifically targets the cortex as it is forming.
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There is not now a vaccine for Zika virus.
