The new report was published today (Feb. 25) in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
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Most troubling, the fetus also showed the first reported birth defect potentially caused by Zika that affected a part of the body other than the central nervous system, according to the report authors.
The new study reports the case of a 20-year-old woman who had an abnormal fetal ultrasound in her 18th week of pregnancy.
Doctors detected the fetus was dead at 32 weeks and delivered the baby.
The first Massachusetts Zika virus case was confirmed last month.
The Zika virus has infected more than a million Brazilians in the past year, by official estimates, and has spread to more than two dozen countries.
But a new study out of Yale School of Public Health and the Hospital Geral Roberto Santos in Salvador, Brazil suggests that infection may be linked to stillbirths and tissue damage beyond the brain.
For this reason, the Maine CDC is recommending that all pregnant women and men who are sexually active with a woman who is pregnant or trying to become pregnant who have traveled to a Zika-affected area be tested for the virus. When researchers examined its tissues, they found genetic material from the Zika virus in its brain, spinal fluid, and amniotic fluid (which nourishes the fetus), but not in the heart, lung, liver, eyes, or placenta.
The Zika virus is transmitted to people who are bitten by an infected Aedes species mosquito.
If Zika starts circulating locally, Lee said, he could conduct testing for that virus.
“I want to reassure you that the government is working very closely with the worldwide Olympic movement, with the local organising committee, supported by the World Health Organization, to make sure we have a very good work plan to target the mosquito, and to make sure that people who will come here either as visitors or athletes will get the maximum protection they need”, Chan said.
The virus, which has swept through the Americas, has already been linked to microcephaly, a condition that leaves children with small skulls, but not to more widespread abnormalities.
A great deal of research is being employed to discover if Zika infection is indeed the cause of the higher incidence of microencephalies, although other causes are also being investigated.
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Chan added that up to 46 countries have reported some level of evidence of Zika infection and that 130 countries are home to the Aedis aegypti mosquito that carries the virus, meaning the eventual spread of the disease could be enormous. The strongest evidence is circumstantial, they said, and there are challenges in confirming the connection.
