Cuban President Raul Castro called on his people to help prevent the entry of the Zika virus in the island while dispatching 9,000 troops to strengthen vector control and sanitation efforts. The rare condition causes infants to be born with abnormally small heads, which often drastically shortens their lifespans.
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The research will be begin Tuesday after an initial training period with for the Brazilian specialists.
The IMB is also following recommendations to test all pregnant women, whether they present symptoms or not, who have traveled to areas with active Zika transmission. Earlier this month OR health officials said a woman became infected while traveling overseas. That leaves a potentially risky four-month stretch in which countries like the US will treat Zika as “guilty until proven innocent” because of the severity of the correlation, and possibly causation, of the virus and the birth defects. Cases of Zika fever have been reported in travelers returning to the United States. Only Brazil, however, has so far reported an alarming increase in cases of microcephaly in newborns. This will involve comparing cases of people with the disease with similar people who did not have the disease to try to identify the cause. It is transmitted through a bite of an infected Aedes species mosquito, the same mosquito that spreads dengue and yellow fever.
“There was ‘extreme concern of Haiti in terms of impact that dengue has there, and of course, the vulnerable population is a challenge, ‘ said Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control…”
Brazilian scientists are also considering the possibility that the Zika virus may be capable of causing other types of malformation, the media report said. The tests will determine if the mothers, whose babies are affected by microcephaly, are also affected by Zika. “One-in-five people who have the virus don’t have symptoms”.
In Paraiba alone, 56 cases of microcephaly have been confirmed since October and 423 suspected cases are under investigation, the Health Ministry says. The mother likely had Zika infection when she was residing in Brazil in May 2015, Hawaii health officials said, and her newborn acquired the infection in the womb.
Data collection is expected to take several weeks, researchers said.
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A adult mosquito is shown in the laboratory of the West Nile Virus program in Strathroy, Ont. Checking if viruses can be transmitted by our local fauna is one of the lessons of West Nile’s introduction, an entomologist says.
