CDC: Ask pregnant women about trips to Zika outbreak areas

Also on Friday, DOH confirmed that laboratory confirmation from the CDC that a past Zika virus infection in a baby recently born with microcephaly in an Oahu hospital.

The Zika virus is spread by the Aedes aegyptimosquito; the same insect that carries yellow fever, dengue fever, and Japanese encephalitis. Recent lab studies have strengthened the link between maternal Zika virus infections and microcephaly, but health officials have said more evidence is needed to show a definitive connection.

Pregnant women should avoid traveling to regions of South and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, where the Zika virus is present, federal officials warned Tuesday. The rare condition, marked by an abnormally small head, is associated with incomplete brain development.

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. Some Brazilian doctors and health workers have been quoted in the media advising women in affected areas not to get pregnant, though it doesn’t seem to be an official recommendation.

This applies to pregnant women who have traveled to Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Numerous mothers are believed to have contracted the virus while pregnant. In those that do, the worst of it involves fever, rash, joint pain, and red eyes — which usually lasts no more than a week. By last May, Zika had made its way to Brazil. Between October 2015 and January 2016, there were more than 3,500 cases of microcephaly in Brazil – a significant increase from the average of about 150 cases per year.

Researchers are testing people now to see how common Zika infection is, how numerous new cases of microcephaly in Brazil also have evidence of Zika infection and just how many new cases there really are. The mosquitoes pick up the virus from infected people, according to the CDC.

“I might have a slight headache, take a Tylenol and continue on with my day…the issue is that [the people who don’t exhibit Zika symptoms] might infect other mosquitos, which can then give Zika to someone else”, he said. “Zika is still a pandemic in progress”, they write, “yet it has already reinforced one important lesson: In our human-dominated world, urban crowding, constant worldwide travel, and other human behaviors combined with human-caused microperturbations in ecologic balance can cause innumerable slumbering infectious agents to emerge unexpectedly”. Currently, there are no commercially available diagnostic tests for Zika infection. Women who have tested negative should consider follow-up ultrasounds for the duration of their pregnancy under the new guidelines.

The self-limiting strain of the Aedes aegypti mosquito was developed by Oxitec, the U.K.-subsidiary of USA synthetic biology company Intrexon.