On Friday U.S. health officials issued a travel warning for 14 countries and territories in the Caribbean and Latin America where infection with Zika is a risk.
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Outbreaks of Zika virus disease have been recorded in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific.
Pregnant women in any stage of their pregnancy should avoid travel to Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Brazil has been experiencing a huge Zika virus infection that began last May, and has seen a startling increase in infants born with microcephaly.
But this is the first time it has been transmitted on Ecuadoran soil, said Veronica Espinosa, deputy cabinet minister responsible for monitoring outbreaks.
Consider Brazil. Health officials there estimate that some 1.5 million people have been infected with Zika in the past year alone, making it ground zero for the largest outbreak in the Americas. Zika virus is related to the dengue, yellow fever and West Nile viruses, which normally do not cause such damage; Zika is not closely related to rubella or cytomegalovirus, which are known to cause microcephaly. But evidence is growing that it may cause a catastrophic birth defect called microcephaly. Travelers to these areas should take special precautions against mosquito bites, including wearing long-sleeve shirts and trousers and using insect repellants. Symptoms are usually mild and experienced for a few days to a week.
Petersen said the virus is becoming a “regional problem”, and a pregnant woman traveling to Brazil is not necessarily at greater risk than if they were to travel to another country on this list.
The alert recommends that women who are pregnant postpone travel to those areas, and that women wanting to become pregnant consult their doctors before setting out on any trip to those areas.
Dengue fever, which can violently affect adults, is transmitted by some of the same mosquitoes as Zika, though it is not thought to affect fetuses in the same way.
The child’s mother was living in Brazil in May and probably was infected by a mosquito then, early in her pregnancy, the health department said.
The government action follows reports that at least 3,500 cases of microcephaly appeared in Brazil between October 2015 and January 2016, the CDC said. Microcephaly is a birth defect where a baby’s head is abnormally small and brain development is incomplete.
In collaboration with Brazilian scientists, researchers at CDC have found evidence of infection in the placentas of two fetuses who died in the womb.
“I think the bottom line is, yes, local transmission can occur, particularly in the areas of the southern United States where vector mosquitoes are present”.
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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.
