A human case of Zika virus has been confirmed Friday in Denton County, officials say.
Advertisement
The warning was issued a day after the health department announced that a fourth CT patient, a nonpregnant woman in her 30s, tested positive for the Zika virus.
“All mosquitoes are attracted to carbon dioxide which we exhale and body heat”, said mosquito expert Dr. Mike Waldvogel with N.C. State.
Spain has recorded its first case of a foetus developing the microcephaly birth defect after a pregnant woman became infected with the Zika virus, health authorities said late on Thursday.
The state lab is certified to test for Zika and confirmed the diagnosis. So far, it’s swept though South and Central America, into Mexico and across the Caribbean. It’s not just pregnant women who are anxious – now it’s touched baseball. The virus, which is carried through mosquitos, has been known to cause birth defects. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in March that at least two women who had contracted Zika during the first trimesters of their pregnancies had elected to have abortions. While there is no sure-fire way to prevent Zika completely, measures like avoiding travel to places where Zika is already a problem, and continued use of bug spray as the temperatures rise in their home states, will be essential.
Such a test would improve upon key limitations of now available options for Zika detection, such as potential cross-reactivity with closely-related viruses and a lack of specialised skills or equipment to screen for the virus outside of large urban areas. However, the tests are complicated and sometimes confuse Zika with similar viruses such as West Nile or dengue.
Upon learning about the Zika outbreak, the researchers chose to try adapting their device to diagnose Zika, which has spread to other parts of South and North America since the outbreak began in Brazil.
According to official statistics, 105 people in Spain have been infected with the mosquito-borne virus. Of those, 36 were pregnant women and eight were sexually transmitted.
Q: Then how would pregnant women know if they’d been infected?
Advertisement
The new test can detect viruses “at significantly lower concentrations than previously possible”, said the study by scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
