Already, the case count of pregnant women with Zika virus has increased significantly under these new monitoring systems – but what does it really mean?
Advertisement
This new data shows that the vast majority of Zika cases in pregnant women are asymptomatic-279 women in the USA states and territories were reported to have laboratory evidence of Zika virus.
As a result, the CDC will now count all pregnant women who tested positive for Zika, regardless of symptoms.
Fewer than ten of the pregnant women infected with Zika in the United States and Puerto Rico gave birth to an infant with microcephaly or any other congenital defect, the CDC added. This includes 157 women in the 50 states and Washington, D.C, plus 122 in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and other U.S. territories.
The Centers for Disease Control announced Friday that it has changed how it reports cases of Zika among pregnant women.
“This is not something where we can build a wall to prevent it, mosquitoes don’t go through customs”, Obama told reporters Friday.
“It is the same genetic material as the virus in Brazil”, WHO spokeswoman Marsha Vanderford said.
“Everything we know about this virus seems to be scarier than we initially thought”, Dr Anne Schuchat of the CDC said in April.
In pregnant mothers, the virus has been linked to brain damage and abnormally small heads among their babies. But in many cases, it was hard to determine how the women became infected because they lived in or had travelled to areas where the virus-carrying mosquitoes were biting. In each case, the person contracted the virus during travels outside of the U.S. Last Saturday, D.C. hosted its first of two citywide prevention events-the department of health handed out kits including bug spray, mosquito dunks, condoms, and more. “It needs to get me a bill that has sufficient funds to do the job”, noting that health officials monitoring the disease requested the money.
Prior to Friday, CDC guidance was only to report cases of Zika if the pregnant women was symptomatic. Obama has asked Congress to allocate $1.9 billion to combat the Zika threat. Obama has threatened to veto it and is pushing for a deal that comes closer to the $1.1 billion Senate bill.
Advertisement
This 2006 photo provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a female Aedes aegypti mosquito in the process of acquiring a blood meal from a human host.
