“If a mosquito is carrying a disease, it is more than just a nuisance”, said Andy Mullins, director of emergency preparedness with the Alabama Department of Public Health, and who oversees the state’s Zika Action Plan.
Advertisement
The Connecticut Department of Health is passing on warnings especially to pregnant women or women planning on becoming pregnant to avoid traveling to countries and Puerto Rico where the Zika virus is known to exist.
But Zika also can be spread through unprotected sex with a man who was infected, which is among the players’ concerns. This level of testing is used for patients who are actively experiencing symptoms of the virus.
“People usually don’t get sick enough to go to the hospital, and they very rarely die of Zika”, notes the CDC’s advisory.
They are also cheap, costing roughly 60 cents to $1 a test to make.
Symptoms of the virus are normally mild, and they commonly include fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis.
A health worker fumigates a neighborhood as part of the preventive measures against the Zika virus and other mosquito-borne diseases in Veracruz on the outskirts of Panama City February 25, 2016.
Of those, 36 were pregnant women and eight were sexually transmitted.
Vietnam has raised Zika alerts after an Australian tourist tested positive after leaving the country on March 6.
“A pregnant woman was infected by Zika and dengue and the foetus has shown various defects”, the health authority of the Catalonia region said in a statement late Thursday.
Since there is now no vaccine available to help prevent the virus, the best thing that can be done to protect yourself from the virus is prevention, Andreadis said. The virus had existed for years, throughout Africa and Asia; it was only identified in April 1947.
“The risk of Zika virus beginning to circulate in the United States on the mainland-it’s already in Puerto Rico, of course-is going to be peaking during the next few weeks”, Scott Weaver, a virologist from the University of Texas Medical Branch told National Geographic.
Advertisement
Since January 2015, the United Nations said 61 countries and territories have reported local transmission of the Zika virus and some have seen “an unprecedented rise” in microcephaly cases. Microcephaly affects the brain development of the fetus, resulting in the baby being born with an abnormally small head and congenital conditions that are associated with incomplete brain development.
