Zika virus should change pregnant women’s travel plans, CDC says

A baby was born in a hospital in Oahu Hawaii with brain damage caused by a mosquito carrying the Zika virus.

Late Friday, CDC advised pregnant women not to travel to Brazil or more than a dozen other countries and territories where local transmission of Zika has occurred. “It causes fever, headache, skin rash, red eyes, muscle ache, that sort of thing”.

In Brazil, Zika virus is being blamed for a 20-fold increase of babies born with microcephaly, or a small, underdeveloped brain.

QUITO, Ecuador-Ecuador said Friday it has detected its first two cases of the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease similar to dengue fever that has been linked to birth defects. Women who can not avoid traveling should consult their doctors and take steps to avoid mosquito bites, such as wearing long sleeves and trousers. There is no vaccine to prevent it and no medicine to treat a Zika virus infection.

Countries that have past or current evidence of Zika virus transmission, as of January 2016.

In its travel advisory, CDC highlighted the need for an “abundance of caution” among pregnant women and those planning to conceive.

The Zika virus is spread by the Aedes mosquito – the same one that carries other diseases that infect humans, including yellow fever, West Nile, chikungunya and dengue.

Health minister Marcelo Castro aims to develop a prevention for Zika, which is spread through mosquito bites, “in record time”.

But Brazil has been raising increasingly loud alarms about Zika.

The CDC action was prompted by tests that found Zika, a mosquito-borne illness, in fetal and newborn tissue of Brazilian babies affected with microcephaly.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “microcephaly is a medical condition in which the circumference of the head is smaller than normal because the brain has not developed properly or has stopped growing”. According to NPR, the number of cases of microcephaly has gone up from an average of around 200 per year to greater than 3,000 cases in 2015.

CDC officials said the biggest risk was in the first trimester of pregnancy, and continued into the second trimester. In December 2015, Puerto Rico reported its first confirmed Zika virus case, according to the CDC.

Some researchers speculate Zika might have arrived in South America during the 2014 World Cup Games in Brazil.

A CDC news release added: “CDC scientists tested samples provided by Brazilian health authorities from two pregnancies that ended in miscarriage and from two infants with diagnosed microcephaly who died shortly after birth”. Doctors have not yet proven the causal link between a viral infection in the mother and the birth condition of the baby, but the association between the two has become strong enough to warrant this action, Petersen said. The disease causes only a mild illness in most people.

2013 G. Anez and M. Rios/BioMed Research International A map showing the areas in the U.S.at risk of dengue outbreaks, based on the approximate distribution of virus-carrying mosquitos.