Dr. Denise Werker said preliminary tests suggest the Saskatchewan resident “probably” has Zika, but it could take upwards of two months for lab confirmation.
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Werner said it was potentially contracted by a woman who had sex with a man who was confirmed to have Zika virus after travelling to an affected country. The woman was not pregnant and had not traveled outside the country. This new study, which puts Zika’s journey westward over a year earlier, suggests that it came over in June 2013, when the Confederations Cup soccer tournament was held in Rio, bringing in a lot of people from South Asia. Now health officials are concerned with those people traveling back from Zika stricken areas after spring break.
“Zika virus disease should be considered in patients with acute onset of fever, rash, arthralgia [joint pain], or conjunctivitis [pink eye] who traveled to areas with ongoing Zika virus transmission or who had unprotected sex with someone who traveled to one of those areas and developed compatible symptoms within two weeks of returning”, the CDC said.
The infection is usually mild and lasts for a week or less.
Kaufman, from Michigan State University’s Department of Entomology, agrees: “The chance of contracting Zika via local transmission by mosquitoes in Michigan is extremely low to non-existent”, he writes in a February 2016 article.
Though Zika isn’t transmitting locally within the US, scientists said that could change once temperatures climb.
About 260 lab-confirmed cases have been reported in Puerto Rico during the current outbreak. Researchers were able to locate similarities among 23 viral genomes from Thailand, French Polynesia, Haiti, Colombia, Martinique, Guatemala, Suriname, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the Americas.
First discovered in the Zika forest of Uganda in 1947, the Zika virus only began spreading widely in May of 2015 when an outbreak occurred in Brazil. The link with microcephaly and other possibly serious birth defects is growing stronger every day.
In Puerto Rico, however, the situation is “of great concern”, Frieden said. In the USA mainland, roughly half of pregnancies are unintended. “And it’s an uphill battle”.
The CDC released the updates today at a media briefing and published the details in three separate reports in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
An estimated 138,000 young Puerto Rican women – one in five women of child-bearing age there – do not want to get pregnant but are not using effective birth control. The World Health Organization estimates there could be up to 4 million cases of Zika in the Americas in the next year.
Puerto Rico has reported 317 cases of locally acquired Zika, putting it at the vanguard of the US epidemic because its warm climes are hospitable to the type of mosquito that serves as the virus’s primary vector.
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Zika, which is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, is now prevalent in much of Latin America and the Caribbean.
