Park said the case underscores the importance of the travel recommendations the CDC issued Friday for pregnant women and women who might become pregnant.
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The virus is now spreading rapidly through the Americas, after it was detected in Brazil in May 2015 and subsequently sparked a health crisis. The ministry suspects the patients contracted Zika locally.
The travel alert targets pregnant women and those who want to become pregnant and follows reports that thousands of babies in Brazil were born a year ago with microcephaly, a brain disorder experts associate with Zika exposure.
While the link between Zika infection in pregnancy and babies born with microcephaly has not yet been proven, mounting evidence supports the theory that there is a connection.
Petersen said people often don’t heed the warnings to protect themselves against mosquitoes while traveling.
The CDC’s Peterson said that the outbreak was a regional problem, with the risk for a pregnant woman traveling to Brazil not necessarily greater than traveling to another country on the list.
Zika virus is transmitted by Aedes species mosquitoes, which also spread dengue and chikungunya viruses and are common in Texas, Florida and elsewhere in the United States.
There’s no known vaccine or treatment for Zika, though people who have been infected may have immunity.
But in pregnant women, the virus can spread to the fetus and cause brain shrinkage or death.
A possible link between Zika virus and congenital birth defects has been found in some babies born to infected mothers. In what may be a first, it warns citizens of the United States from entering a part of the United States, the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico. “All four mothers reported having experienced a fever and rash illness consistent with Zika virus disease during their pregnancies”. Normally the country sees 150 cases annually. Brazilian health authorities reported that over 3.500 cases of microcephaly occurred between October 2015 and January 201.
If you’re traveling to South America, Central America, or even the Caribbean, there’s a new mosquito-borne virus that has been linked to birth defects and miscarriages. “It isn’t as if it’s turning around and dying out, it’s getting worse and worse as the days go by”.
The Brazilian government said on Saturday it was directing funds to a biomedical research centre to help develop a vaccine against the virus.
Infectious disease control will need to step up its game if that reality comes to pass, said Fauci. “We’re moving mosquitos around the world at will right now”, Osterholm says.
Hawaiian health officials say that the baby’s infection did not originate in the state, but rather, the pregnant woman traveled from Brazil likely already infected with the disease, according to the release.
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Zika can be hard to diagnose, because its symptoms are similar to those of dengue fever, also known as “break bone fever” because of the severe joint pain it causes, and chikungunya, which first arrived in the Western Hemisphere in 2013 and whose African name means “bent over”, because of the stooped posture that the disease causes.
