Correspondents Sandee LaMotte and Debra Goldschmidt report the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Friday night an advisory against pregnant women travelling to Mexico, Puerto Rico, and parts of Central America and South America due to the presence of the Zika virus. Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “We haven’t begun to see the full impact of this outbreak.” The CDC action was prompted by tests that found Zika, a mosquito-borne illness, in fetal and newborn tissue of Brazilian babies affected with microcephaly. The CDC suggested pregnant women who must travel, talk to health care providers beforehand and follow steps to prevent mosquito bites. Ecuador had previously counted four cases, but the infected people had returned from travel to affected areas. The health ministry announced two new cases on Friday: the infected have not left the country. The ministry suspects the patients contracted Zika locally.
The Zika virus is linked to the neurological disorder, microcephaly, which results in babies being born with abnormally small heads, causing severe developmental issues and sometimes death. Director of the Vector-Born Disease division of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the CDC, Dr. Lyle Peterson, said “We now have an accumulating number of cases in babies from miscarriage or who were born with microcephaly with evidence of Zika, that suggests a stronger and stronger relationship of Zika and microcephaly.” Other travelers are now under a level two travel alert and are asked to practice enhanced precautions, including the use of EPA-registered repellents containing DEET, using permethrin-treated clothing and gear, and staying inside screened or air-conditioned rooms. Petersen said people often don’t heed the warnings to protect themselves against mosquitoes while traveling. The Zika virus is transmitted when Aedes mosquitoes bite an infected person, then spread the obtained virus by biting others. There is no vaccine to prevent it and no medicine to treat a Zika virus infection. The CDC says, in theory, the Zika virus could be spread through blood transfusion, but as yet there are no documented cases. There is one case of possible virus transmission via sexual contact.
Last November, Brazilian health officials advised Brazilian women not to become pregnant after they discovered a connection between the Zika virus and an alarming increase in microcephaly. In 2014, there were only 147 cases of the neurological impairment in the country. According to the latest numbers from Brazil’s Health Ministry, 3,530 cases of microcephaly and 46 infant deaths may be linked to the virus. Director of The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said “That’s a pandemic in progress. It isn’t as if it’s turning around and dying out, it’s getting worse and worse as the days go by, and it’s determined by officials in Brazil that peak mosquito transmitting time is in April, so we haven’t begun to see the full impact of this outbreak. We don’t have vaccines or therapeutics, and we need better diagnostics that can be done at point of care. We’re aggressively working on a Zika vaccine but the best thing right now is avoidance or mosquito control.”
Earlier this week, health officials in Harris County, Texas confirmed a case of Zika virus in a person who recently returned from Latin America, where the virus is endemic. According to CDC spokesman Tom Skinner, there have been 14 imported cases of Zika virus among returning U.S. travelers from 2007 to 2014. At least another eight imported cases were confirmed by the CDC in 2015 and 2016, and they are still running tests on specimens from returning U.S. travelers who became ill last year and this year, so that number could rise. The concern, of course, is whether these cases imported to the United States could result in locally transmitted cases. The Aedes mosquito, which transmits Zika virus, is present in many areas of the United States.
