CDC adds countries to Zika travel alert

With news of more birth defects linked to the Zika virus in Brazil prompting the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue travel advisories for affected countries, here is a primer for travelers.

It added Barbados, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin, Guyana, Cape Verde and Samoa.

The CDC says doctors should ask all pregnant women if they’ve been to affected areas, and get them tested for Zika if they have traveled and also show symptoms.

Zika symptoms are generally milder than those of dengue and chikungunya and can include a slight fever, headache and pain in the hands and feet.

The Zika virus has already been tentatively linked to a rash of microcephaly, a birth defect in which babies are born with unusually small heads.

“Microcephaly is a birth defect that is characterized by abnormal brain developmnent in the fetus”, explained Dr. Jennifer Brown, the State Public Health Veterinarian for the Indiana State Department of Health. The number of reported deaths of deformed babies rose to 49, ministry officials said at a news conference earlier this week.

A pregnant woman stands at her house in a zone of the shanty town of Beco do Sururu, located close to Boa Viagem, the richest neighborhood of city of Recife, Brazil, January 22, 2016.

Thousands of babies in Brazil were born previous year with microcephaly, a brain disorder that experts associate with Zika exposure.

Brazil’s health ministry said there had been 3,893 suspected cases of microcephaly since October, when the authorities first noticed a surge, up from 3,500 in last week’s report.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) activated its emergency operations center (EOC) on Friday to better coordinate response to the Zika virus.

It is believed that the virus may have arrived in Brazil when the country hosted the 2014 World Cup carried by visitors from French Polynesia, after an outbreak had occurred there.

Beyond the possible problems for pregnant women and their babies, it appears that anyone who catches Zika can later develop Guillain-Burre Syndrome, which is a progressive paralysis that starts in the legs and can be life threatening. For most of those infected, the virus causes a short illness lasting between two and seven days. People who have recovered from an infection can not spread the virus to mosquitoes and people don’t infect other people, with the rare possibility that men may sometimes transmit it in sperm. Indeed, the virus was first identified in 1947 in a rhesus monkey in Uganda’s Zika forest (which gave the disease its name). The two conditions that are needed for spread are groups of now infected people and populations of Aedes mosquitoes. “Some people will pay attention to this and realize they are at risk for something, others are obviously going to ignore it”, he said.