Zika virus: Brazil soldiers deployed to warn of risks

Outside Maracana Stadium, Japanese tourist Noko Sudrura said that she put aside concerns about the Zika virus so she could experience Brazil’s recent Carnival.

On Friday, Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, said no countries had announced plans to pull out of the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro over concerns about the virus.

The mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus are not established in Iowa, nor have they been for the past 45 years that the mosquito population has been monitored in the state, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health.

Early Saturday, some 220,000 soldiers fanned out across the vast South American country, part of an operation aiming to knock on three million doors and distribute informational leaflets.

There is now no treatment for Zika and much remains unknown about the disease, including whether the virus causes microcephaly, a medical condition in which the head in newborns is smaller than normal because the brain has not developed properly or has stopped growing.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned pregnant women to avoid travelling to more than two dozen countries and territories in the Americas where outbreaks are active.

Members of the three branches of the armed forces visited homes, restaurants and shops, sharing information on how to eradicate mosquito breeding areas that are found in everyday settings.

“In a few weeks or months, we will find out how many of these women deliver a child with microcephaly”, she said.

“The government is taking the lead but that alone won t win the war”, she said.

We also have the natural factor that should help, which is that July and August (winter in the southern hemisphere) are part of a period in which the infestation of Aedes aegypti is very low.

Several government ministers accompanied troops in other major cities including Salvador, Recife, Curitiba and Porto Alegre.

The outbreak, which started in Brazil in 2015, involved a sharp increase in microcephaly cases in the country.

Yesterday, Colombia’s national health institute said more than 5,000 pregnant women were infected with Zika. Another 3,852 suspected cases were being studied.

For this year, they are forecasting 600,000 Zika cases overall and about 500 cases of microcephaly.

With Ebola, which comes from the same family of viruses as Zika, research on persistence in semen has shown that it could last up to nine months in some men.

The US experts are studying “the possibility of a vaccine” alongside specialists from the Colombian Health Ministry, Ambassador Kevin Whitaker said from Bogota, capital of the second worst-hit nation.

The World Health Organization has declared the rise in Zika-linked birth defects an worldwide emergency.