Infection during pregnancy can result in birth defects.
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CDC updates its interim guidance related to Zika virus transmission and related health effects based on the accumulating evidence, expert opinion, and knowledge about the risk associated with other viral infections.
Men who get sick with Zika virus have to wait at least six months before trying to have a baby, say doctors out of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It expands CDC’s definition of sexual exposure to Zika to include sex without a barrier method (including male or female condoms, among other methods) with any person – male or female – who has traveled to or lives in an area with Zika.
These precautions now include either straight or lesbian couples where one partner could pass the virus on to her pregnant partner.
A Spanish woman infected with the mosquito-borne Zika virus has given birth to a baby with microcephaly, the first such birth to have occurred in Europe. The CDC has reemphasized how critical it is that doctors test pregnant women within a short period of time following potential exposure to try to catch the virus on the PCR test. At HHS, we’re going to do everything we can to prevent, detect and respond to this virus here in the United States, and especially in hard-hit places like Puerto Rico, but hope there is action on this necessary funding as soon as the Congress returns.
Late last week, Florida health officials said they were investigating a second possible case of locally transmitted Zika infection. His mother reportedly contracted the Zika virus during a trip to Latin America.
“We want to make sure we reduce the mosquito population down to zero if possible in this case”, said Chalmers Vasquez, Miami-Dade County’s mosquito control operations manager.
Florida health officials said they are capturing and testing mosquitoes in the neighborhoods where the two unidentified patients live. Burwell says it has been found in 5,200 cases between the US and Puerto Rico in recent months.
The CDC said it has provided $2 million for Zika preparedness and another $5.6 million was just allotted, the newspaper reported. Zika, which is carried by mosquitoes, already is a major problem in South and Central American countries, and experts predict that southern states in the USA will see more cases this summer.
In a “worse-case scenario”, only three to 37 athletes, tourists and journalists travelling to Rio de Janeiro could bring Zika virus back to their home countries, Yale University scientists said in new findings also published Monday.
There have been no reports of Zika being transmitted by mosquitoes in Dallas County.
65 million pregnant women – before the epidemic fizzles out, a team reported in the journal Nature Microbiology.
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An estimated 80 percent of Zika infections do not cause symptoms, his team noted. A non-pregnant woman in her 20s had unprotected vaginal sex with a male partner on the day she returned from travel to a country where Zika is circulating.
