Arkansas officials confirm Zika virus case, and it could spread

The rare birth defect causes babies to be born with unusually small heads and can cause lasting developmental problems. “But, of course, the huge increase of Zika, especially in north-eastern Brazil, and the rise of Zika cases gives a lot of reason for concern and now the big task is to try to establish the link here”, said World Health Organization spokesman Christian Lindmeier. To put that in perspective, there were only 146 cases in 2014.

Researchers have published the disease trajectory of the Zika virus as it spread across Colombia over the course of just 3 months from 9 instances of infection in October 2015 to 13,000 in January 2016.

The mosquito-spread Zika virus appeared in Brazil past year and officials say hundreds of thousands of people apparently have been infected.

Women in El Salvador have already been told to leave off getting pregnant until 2018, as it seems likely the virus causes brain damage in infants. JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines were not immediately able to say whether they were offering refunds. The most common symptoms are fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis.

One in four people infected with Zika develop symptoms and many cases of Zika go undetected, making it hard to estimate the true scale of the outbreak in the Americas. “For pregnant women this is a very serious consideration”.

In the past year the virus “exploded” said Prof Weaver, sweeping through the Caribbean and Latin America “infecting probably a couple of million people”.

But Wednesday’s report says only 270 of those cases have been confirmed.

While there are no locally contracted cases of Zika in Australia, Dr Harley said it was not impossible for the mosquito-borne disease to make its way to Australia.

There have been only two documented cases linking Zika to sex. Of the total, only 798 have been confirmed by blood tests.

Zika has arrived in the United States, but only from travelers returning from these infected areas.

The virus, which is transmitted via mosquitoes, has been identified in the U.S., but only in people who’ve recently travelled to Zika hot spots.

Mosquitoes, which carry the virus, are most common in Central and South America and in the Caribbean. A little over 7% of Americans live in areas where the cold might not kill off the mosquito in the winter, leaving them vulnerable year round.

For a country that for years has battled the Aedes aegypti mosquito – responsible for previous epidemics of dengue, yellow fever and other tropical diseases – the outbreak of Zika has caught the government, public health administrators and doctors entirely off guard.

Earnest says President Barack Obama has no plans at this point to appoint a “Zika czar” in the same way it selected someone to coordinate the administration’s response to Ebola.

It’s called the Aedes aegypti (AYE’-dees uh-GYP’-tie), a species of mosquito that has played a villainous role in public health history and defeated attempts to eradicate it from the New World.