Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called for Latin America to launch a region-wide fight against the Zika virus, blamed for a surge in brain-damaged babies, as alarm rose over the world’s latest health scare.
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The Anoka County woman, who is in her 60s, had recently returned from Honduras, which is in the heart of an outbreak that started previous year.
However, to date, California public health officials say there has been no transmission of the Zika virus here.
Airlines are reacting to concern among pregnant women about travel to affected countries.
Recent models for how the disease is spreading predict “significant worldwide spread by travelers from Brazil to the rest of the Americas, Europe, and Asia”, Dr. Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease expert, and Lawrence Gostin, a global health law expert, wrote in the viewpoint article in JAMA.
Jan 28, 2016- United States scientists have urged the World Health Organisation to take urgent action over the Zika virus, which they say has “explosive pandemic potential”.
The symptoms in adults and children are similar to those for dengue fever but generally milder, including flu-like aches, inflammation of the eyes, joint pain and rashes although some people have no symptoms at all. The White House said that he “emphasised the need to accelerate research efforts to make available better diagnostic tests, to develop vaccines and therapeutics, and to ensure that all Americans have information about the Zika virus”.
Death or hospitalisation from the virus is unusual, but it has been linked to congenital skull and brain abnormalities in newborns.
The implications of the Zika virus – which also has reportedly led to paralysis in some cases – have caused widespread panic in the Southern Hemisphere since last fall, when cases of microcephaly, abnormal smallness of the head in babies, ballooned in Brazil from 150 in 2014 to 3,900 in the past four months.
Nicaragua is reporting the Central American nation’s first known cases of the Zika virus in two women in the capital of Managua.
But Wednesday’s report says only 270 of those cases have been confirmed.
Only 29 new cases of microcephaly were reported last week in all of Pernambuco, compared to a peak of 196 in late November.
The Zika virus has already spread elsewhere in South America.
The ministry stopped publishing data on all epidemic diseases a year ago.
The symptoms of Zika virus are “really nonspecific and it overlaps with a lot of things, especially with dengue virus and chikungunya”, Aliota noted.
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In adults Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare disorder in which the immune system attacks the nervous system, has been associated with Zika virus infection. More than 1,000 cases of microcephaly have been reported in just a few months in Pernambuco state, the epicenter of the Zika outbreak.
