Travis County Confirms First Case of Zika Virus

The Zika virus was first discovered by researchers in the Ugandan Zika Forest in 1947, but its recent explosive spread through Brazil and French Polynesia has sparked the World Health Organisation to declare a public health emergency.

The decision also provides for people entering Japan to be screened for the virus at quarantine stations from February 15.

Local health officials said on Thursday both those people have fully recovered from the virus.

– The DC Department of Health has confirmed three cases of Zika virus in Washington, including one case in a pregnant woman. It doesn’t recommend that men without symptoms be tested for the virus.

In addition to the Austin case and the two Zika infections in Dallas County, the state has confirmed seven cases in Harris County and one in Bexar County.

Frieden offered his strongest comments yet about the link between the insect-borne virus and the birth defect, microcephaly, which causes babies to be born with unusually small heads and cognitive problems.

The health ministry said the woman had recently returned from Colombia, where it is believed she was infected.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republican Senators Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Richard Burr of North Carolina, a Republican from Kentucky have asked Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell for more information on the US response to the virus.

• The Zika virus is transmitted primarily by the Aedes aegypti mosquito which has never been identified in Nebraska.

The fever starts with a mosquito bite and normally causes little more than a fever and rash.

The latest case marks the second time the virus has ever been recorded in Western Australia, ABC news reports. It said it was reinforcing instructions to blood banks that people infected with Zika or dengue not be permitted to donate blood for 30 days after full recovery from the active stage of Zika infection.

Chief Medical Officer Professor Dame Sally Davies said: “We are determined to support worldwide efforts to understand how to diagnose the disease and control its spread”.

“We have no data to support urine or saliva”, transmission at this point, Frieden said.

The virus has also been linked to a potentially paralysing nerve disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome in some patients.