An outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus Zika is affecting large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean and spreading quickly through the region.
Advertisement
The agency issued an advisory last week against travel to Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and the U.S.
According to Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Lucileia Johnson, the CDC issued the alert following reports in Brazil of a birth defect called Microcephaly and other poor pregnancy outcomes in babies whose mothers were infected with Zika while pregnant.
In Brazil, the number of infants born with microcephaly increased by a factor of 20 compared to past years, rising from around 150-plus annually to over 3,500 in 2015, when the Zika virus began to spread.
You can protect yourself by wearing long sleeves, using mosquito repellent and keeping standing water around your house drained.
There is no vaccine for the virus, which can cause fever, rashes, joint pains, and conjunctivitis within days of being contracted. They’re trying to discover if that change has made the virus more likely to spread and whether it’s changed the way Zika affects people.
El Salvador is urging women in the Central American nation to avoid getting pregnant until 2018 to avoid their children developing birth defects from the mosquito-borne Zika virus which has rampaged through the Americas.
The virus is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the same mosquito which transmits dengue fever.
“Until we understand the science better, postponing planned pregnancies is a sensible option”, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Laura Rodrigues told the Independent.
Experts said microcephaly may not have been seen in other Zika outbreaks because until now, they’ve occurred in much smaller populations.
However, women’s rights campaigners criticised the recommendations, saying women in the region often had little choice about becoming pregnant.
For decades Zika was a virus that turned up in monkeys and occasionally in humans in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Advertisement
She concedes, however, that all it takes is one mosquito to get inside a van from an inhabited place to bring it to a place where they are not prevalent.
