While most people infected with Zika have only mild symptoms, rising anxiety about the virus is driven by its strongly suspected link to the two more serious conditions.
Advertisement
On Saturday, the World Health Organization said that Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Suriname and Venezuela have all reported a rise in GBS “in the context of the Zika virus outbreak”.
Scientists are “weeks, not years” from developing a test for the fast-spreading Zika virus, but large-scale clinical trials for a potential vaccine are at least 18 months away, the World Health Organization announced Friday.
The virus is carried by mosquitoes and has been linked to birth defects.
The WHO said that institutions in the United States and India were leading the race to find a way of immunising against the mosquito-borne disease, which is expected to be officially linked to the birth defect microcephaly within weeks.
Like the other two cases, Zika was found in returning travelers – a 56-year-old Butler County woman, who recently returned from Guyana, and a 60-year-old Licking County man returning from Haiti.
Kieny said that different types of possible vaccines – such as live or killed virus, or the use of DNA vaccines – may lead to differences in timing on development, but developers “are all starting at a very basic level”.
“I would suggest that all women who are in that age group and are going down there to travel, don’t”, says Bhargava.
“What makes it nerve-wracking right now, we’re saying this is probably unsafe for pregnant women but there’s not enough information and long-term data to see what the consequences are”, said Sara West, Marquette University nursing major.
The South American country has suffered the most cases of Zika in the current outbreak, with 1.5 million people infected since early 2015.
The focus of fighting the virus has been on eliminating its carrier, the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
China confirmed its first imported case of the Zika virus on Tuesday, and its southwestern border province of Yunnan is on high alert, providing 24-hour laboratory tests for the virus.
Brazil’s high-profile public awareness campaign kicks off as one of the country’s top health officials warned that Zika is likely to spread to densely populated areas.
Advertisement
There are more than 25,000 cases of Zika across the country – 22,600 confirmed cases and around 3,000 suspected cases – according to the latest INS figures. In Brazil, this epidemic coincides with a mysterious explosion in the number of cases of children born with abnormally small heads.
