The mosquito-borne Zika virus, which is thought to cause defects in newborn babies, is now “spreading explosively”, the body said.
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“The important thing is that it’s not going from person to person and it’s not in the mosquito population in Alabama”, Jones said.
Alabama health officials are advising pregnant woman to consider postponing travel to areas where the Zika virus is being transmitted, which includes South and Central America, Puerto Rico, Mexico and parts of the Caribbean.
ECUADOR: 33 cases of the Zika virus have been reported in the South American nation of Ecuador, with 17 of them confirmed by laboratory tests.
Infected people can expect fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes for a couple of days or up to a week, and hospitalization is rare, the CDC says.
“The level of alarm is extremely high”, WHO director-general Margaret Chan told the organization’s executive board in Geneva on Thursday.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, there have not been any locally transmitted Zika cases reported in the United States, but there have been cases reported in returning travelers.
There is no vaccine or treatment for Zika, which the World Health Organisation said is “spreading explosively” through the Americas and may lead to as many as four million cases in the region.
Drawing a contrast with Ebola, Espinal stressed that Zika needs a carrier to spread and that controlling the mosquito was therefore crucial to controlling the outbreak.
“There are some potential concerns that it may persist in certain protected sites, the same way that we discovered Ebola virus does”, Simor said.
With the exception of the risks for unborn babies, Zika is not considered risky.
BRAZIL: The mosquito-spread Zika virus appeared in Brazil past year and officials say hundreds of thousands of people have been infected.
Transat says pregnant women with a medical note can reschedule or change destinations if they were booked to fly to countries that have been listed by the Pan American Health Organization as having the virus.
Sylvain Aldighieri, head of WHO’s epidemic response team in the Americas, estimated there could be 3 million to 4 million Zika infections in the region over the next year.
Women in Latin America have been urged by the El Salvador government not to get pregnant for as long as two years, in a bid to avoid the birth defects associated with the virus.
The best way to prevent the virus spreading is to clear stagnant water, where the mosquitos lay eggs and to protect against bites.
Brazil’s Zika outbreak and the spike in microcephaly cases among babies have been concentrated in the poor and underdeveloped northeast of the country, and through the southeast, where Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are located.
Aedes aegypti mosquito larvae sit in a petri dish at the Fiocruz institute in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016.
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Dr. Chan disclosed that she has set up a Zika “emergency team” after the volatile outbreak of the virus, adding that the team would meet on Monday to decide whether Zika should be treated as a global emergency.
