World Health Organization leader: Zika virus ‘spreading explosively’

The Zika virus is “is now spreading explosively” in the Americas, the head of the World Health Organization said Thursday, with another official estimating between 3 million and 4 million Zika infections in the region over a 12-month period.

As with so many viruses, there is no specific treatment for Zika.

The people who picked up the virus were traveling outside of the country in either South or Central America or the Caribbean.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview this week that scientists at the National Institutes of Health were working on both.

In a Twitter message, Rousseff said that “we must declare war on the Aedes aegypti mosquito” and pursue an operation aimed at breeding grounds for the insect until a vaccine is developed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning pregnant women against travel to affected areas.

Zika virus is hard to diagnose, especially in the case of pregnant woman and their unborn children, according to Wired.

Director-general Margaret Chan told members of WHO’s executive board in Geneva that the spread of the mosquito-borne disease had gone from a mild threat to one of alarming proportions.

The WHO’s Chan said that while a direct causal relationship between Zika virus infection and birth malformations has not yet been established, it is “strongly suspected”.

The Zika virus was first discovered in 1947 in a rhesus monkey in Uganda.

While it’s not entirely clear when the viral outbreak started or if there was “patient zero” who spread the virus, researchers who published the June 2015 study speculated that the virus may have come to Brazil during major sporting events that brought together tens to hundreds of thousands of global travelers in close proximity.

But remember, viruses are stealthy – they constantly tweak themselves to become more resilient in their environment.

The CDC is asking OB-GYNs to review fetal ultrasounds and do maternal testing for any pregnant woman who has traveled to one of the 24 countries where Zika is now active.

“It’s new because it’s in a population that has never been exposed to this virus”.

Armbruster said the evidence is strong that it may have been an infected traveler from French Polynesia because the samples are from an Asian strain of the virus.

Back in the country Friday, she again stressed the importance of a broad mosquito eradication effort during a talk in the capital of Brasilia at a meeting of top business leaders held to discuss ending Brazil’s recession. The female Aedes aegypti, the primary carrier of Zika, is an aggressive biter, preferring daytime to dusk and indoors to outdoors. He adds if people must, then to practice good mosquito protection techniques. So far, it’s been linked to a 20-fold increase in a rare defect called microcephaly in babies, in which the newborns are born with irregularly small heads and underdeveloped brains.