Florida confirms birth defects after mom gets Zika abroad

According to CDC guidance, providers should consider testing all pregnant women with a history of travel to a Zika affected area for the virus.

“There’s no way you can stop the spread of the mosquito”, he said.

The study, published in the journal Nature, showed that single shots of either vaccine completely protected the mice against Zika.

Senate Democrats, including Bill Nelson of Florida, on Tuesday blocked a GOP proposal to provide $1.1 billion to fight the Zika virus, faulting Republicans for including restrictions on Planned Parenthood money and changes to policies on pesticide spraying. The second was made from an inactivated version of the virus found in Puerto Rico.

The Biosecurity Research Institute can help answer some of those questions and is equipped to handle any vaccine studies as well as diagnostic studies, Higgs said.

There is no vaccine to prevent infection and no specific antiviral treatment for it, officials said.

“We need to be cautious about extrapolating these results from mice to humans”, Barouch said in the press conference. Scientists led by Dan H. Barouch, M.D., Ph.D., at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School, as well as the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, developed one of the Zika vaccines.

This “critical first step” is leading to trials in monkeys and humans, “and gives us early confidence that development of a protective Zika virus vaccine for humans is feasible”, said researcher Col. Nelson Michael. People usually do not get sick enough to go to the hospital, and death due to the Zika virus is very rare, according to the CDC.

All eight animals were infected. The researchers will be taking blood, urine, saliva and vaginal swab samples from the mothers, who will be given information about Zika symptoms. But what’s novel is that the team is posting its raw data online right away – even ultrasound images of developing monkeys that they acknowledged at the time “can elicit stronger emotions than looking at relatively sterile charts” – so that normally competing research labs can work together to speed discoveries.

The scientists are still working to understand whether the pregnant monkeys will pass the infection along to their fetuses, and whether infected monkeys can transmit the virus sexually, as has been seen in infected humans.

Its possible link to a serious birth defect called microcephaly has garnered much of the world’s attention since the current outbreak began in May 2015 with the first confirmed Zika virus infection in Brazil. Countries where the virus is endemic are also seeing more cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a neurological illness.