Zika virus infects Upstate resident, 2 others from NY

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention issued initial travel warnings to pregnant women last week, adding eight more places to the list on Friday.

Public Health England said in a statement on its website the three people had presented with the virus after travelling to Colombia, Suriname and Guyana, all countries which are experiencing Zika outbreaks.

The virus is transmitted through mosquito bites and “is not spread directly from person to person”, according to PHE. Symptoms of Zika include low-grade fever, joint pain, rash, conjunctivitis, headache, muscle pain and eye pain. The virus was first isolated from a monkey in Uganda’s Zika forest in 1947.

Babies across the region, and at least one in the United States, have been born with abnormally smaller heads – a condition doctors call microcephaly, which can cause brain damage.

There is now no vaccine or medicine to treat Zika virus.

Zika has been linked to microcephaly, a birth defect that causes newborns to have unusually small heads and abnormal brain development.

[The] CDC recommends that all pregnant women consider postponing travel to areas where Zika virus transmission is ongoing.

Women in El Salvador should wait until 2018 before getting pregnant, the deputy health minister Eduardo Espinoza said, while Jamaica has asked women to avoid pregnancy for 6 to 12 months. And about 80 percent of people who get infected with it don’t even get sick at all.

The virus is not contagious and normally has flu-like symptoms.

In Brazil, the authorities reported more than 3,500 cases of microcephaly this past year, which is a dramatic increase from the 150 cases that were confirmed in 2014. Their spinal fluid is being analyzed for Zika and other infections, but the results are not back yet, the Brazilian team reported in a CDC bulletin.

Before past year there were about 160 cases of microcephaly in Brazil on average.

The ECDC advised all travelers to the affected areas “to take protective measures against mosquito bites, including during the day”. Transmission had previously, in large part, been isolated to parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands.