Lacking an approved test, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in February and March issued emergency authorizations for up to 150 laboratories around the country to begin using two methods for diagnosis. But in the a year ago, infections in pregnant women have been strongly linked to fetal deaths and devastating birth defects, mostly in Brazil.
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She notes adults who contract the virus will see relatively mild symptoms, if any. For those that do, the symptoms usually cease in about a week and have no lasting negative effects.
The CDC has said it’s easy to predict where Zika will spread, just by looking at where its close cousins, chikungunya and dengue virus, are spreading. Dr. Marcos Espinal, the Pan American Health Organization’s director of communicable diseases, recently said, “Zika virus will go everywhere the mosquito is”.
Researchers now also know the disease can spread through sexual contact.
Almost 300 million people in the Americas live in areas where the mosquitoes that spread Zika thrive, and more than 5 million babies a year are born to women living in these areas, the team at the University of Washington, Oxford University and elsewhere report in the journal ELife.
The country had previously reported cases of Zika in people who contracted it overseas and one case of it being sexually transmitted in Chile. Babies with microcephaly often have smaller brains that have not developed properly.
The Center for Disease Control even suggests pregnant women not travel to areas where there has been a Zika virus outbreak. “Things that they call meningoencephalitis, which is an inflammation of the brain and the covering around the brain, spinal cord damage due to what we call myelitis”.
“It looks really bad for the brain”, he says, noting they saw evidence of meningitis, cell infiltration and necrosis (abnormal cellular death).
Local doctors say they’re not yet advising women not to attempt getting pregnant. “Since it’s now shown to be transmitted other ways, we scientifically need to broaden our thinking and not make assumptions about that”.
The commonwealth of Virginia will now be able to timely detect any potential Zika virus outbreaks. Valderramos says the explanation could be purely methodological; her team, and scientists before her, have not sampled enough mosquitoes to have a comprehensive picture of all the possible Zika virus strains in the world.
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“At warmer temperatures, this time period is shortened, leading to a greater likelihood that transmission will occur before the mosquito dies”, said Lyle Petersen, an expert on vector-borne diseases at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases in Fort Collins, Colorado. Many Florida residents are not happy about being the government’s guinea pigs, especially since no cases of the Zika virus have been reported in the area. Answering these will be the focus of ongoing research to help improve prevention efforts, which ultimately may help reduce the effects of zika virus infection during pregnancy. But, he cautions that Zika is an important public health problem that everyone should be concerned about.
