If a Zika infected mosquito bites a woman that is pregnant or may become pregnant, the Zika virus can be passed to her baby during pregnancy or at the time of birth.
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Texas is considered a high risk state. All cases are travel-related, the state reported.
State, local and federal officials need to coordinate the fight against Zika the way that they already work together to respond to natural disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, said Nicole Lurie, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Congressional Republicans told Mr. Obama to spend leftover Ebola funds instead of seeking a cash infusion to fight the Zika virus, which is circulating through Latin America and Puerto Rico and could puncture the USA mainland in the coming months. So far, more than 300,000 people who reported Zika in the US caught the disease during travel to regions with Zika outbreaks.
Outbreaks of the Zika virus are likely to occur in the United States; so to prepare, health officials are developing plans to combat Zika that focus on protecting pregnant women from the virus.
“Nothing about Zika is going to be easy or quick”, Dr. Frieden said.
The Zika virus has been linked to devastating birth defects.
Most of these programs, Petersen said, are “primarily funded to control nuisance mosquitoes rather than to control disease-spreading mosquitoes”.
“If we wait until the public is panicking, until we see babies being born with birth defects, we have waited too long”, said Amy Pope, White House Deputy Homeland Security Advisor said.
The $1.9 billion requested includes $828 million for the CDC and would be used to accelerate vaccine research, develop a long-term strategy to prevent Zika, expand lab capacity and testing, boost mosquito control, and support low-income pregnant women, officials said.
According to the California Department of Public Health, which updates the number of Zika cases on its website each week, the Golden State now has a total of 30 cases from 2015 through Friday.
“Zika’s not a new virus”, said Helen Lazear, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the UNC School of Medicine.
“We can’t spray our way out of this”, Thompson said.
“Even if we take money from other pots, even if we make these very hard choices, the money we have now is not enough”, she added.
First detected in Brazil, the virus is growing throughout the Americas.
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Dr. Paul Ettestad, state public health officer with the New Mexico Department of Health, said Peterson’s map made him laugh because some of the areas where the mosquito is shown, “are [the result of] just one guy in the county who drives a snowplow in the winter and does some fogging in the summertime”.
