Friday, the Administration of Food and Drugs (FDA) recommended that all the blood donations that are made in the United States to be put to tests to detect the virus of Zika.
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Furthermore, as numerous people infected with Zika do not show symptoms, some transmission may already have taken place before the latest case of Zika was identified.
Dr Alyssa Ziman, medical director of the clinical laboratories and transfusion medicine at the University of California Los Angeles, said the new recommendations for Zika follow the similar steps the FDA took to protect the blood supply from the West Nile virus.
Zika is carried by mosquitoes, which transmit the virus to humans.
The statement said three other suspect cases — two from a family who live in the area and another individual who works nearby — had preliminarily tested positive for the mosquito-borne virus based on their urine samples. A case of suspected transmission through a blood transfusion in Brazil has raised questions about other ways that Zika may spread.
Overall, the Guillain-Barre surveillance system identified 56 cases of the syndrome in people infected from January 1 to July 31, 2016, officials from the Puerto Rican health department and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday in the CDC’s weekly report on death and disease. No such cases have been reported in the United States. The cost of adding Zika tests aren’t yet known, but FDA officials said the move is essential because the problems caused by the virus are so serious and scientists are continuing to learn about other affects.
“As she had not travelled to Zika-affected areas recently, she was likely to have been infected in Singapore”, the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the National Environment Agency said in a joint statement late Saturday.
The report details the case of a Maryland man who went to the Dominican Republic, where there is a Zika outbreak.
In addition to tests to check whole blood for Zika RNA, the agency said blood collection centers were permitted to use Cerus Corp’s Intercept pathogen inactivation system in certain blood products, such as plasma. Fifty-six suspected cases of Guillain-Barre were reported the first seven months of 2016, of which 34 were linked to infection with Zika or an unspecified flavivirus.
The FDA says the nation’s blood supply should be checked for the Zika virus. But both had visited a Zika area so infection from mosquito bites couldn’t be ruled out.
The earlier FDA guidance on Zika testing, issued on February 16, had also recommended that blood donor centers “use pathogen-reduction devices, or halt blood collection and obtain Whole Blood and blood components from areas of the US without active virus transmission”. Friday’s directive lists 11 states that will need to begin screening blood in the next month due to their location or because of the influx of travelers from Zika outbreak countries.
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Such testing also helped spot one unit of Zika-tainted blood in the past few weeks.
