Pregnant US Women Afflicted with Zika, One Has Son With Microcephaly

Feb 29, 2016, 20:34

The CDC are now investigating an additional ten suspected cases of Zika among USA pregnant women.

- Three of the women have delivered babies; two of the newborns are apparently healthy, and one was born with microcephaly.

The large number of sexual transmitted cases of the Zika virus has also surprised the CDC officials.

"With dengue and chikungunya circulating in the region, diagnosing Zika is a great challenge", says Maria Guadalupe Guzman, head of the Department of Virology of the Institute of Tropical Medicine Pedro Kouri of Cuba and president of the lab network.

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The Zika project was funded through a philanthropic grant from L.E. and Virginia Simmons, a local couple, and is part of a larger effort at Houston Methodist to bolster hospital-based rapid response systems for infectious diseases. The most serious risk from Zika seems to be to pregnant women and their developing fetus, Frieden said. "We are dealing with a tricky virus, full of uncertainties, so we should be prepared for surprises", she said.

The infected woman, however, is not pregnant and recovering well while at low risk of any complications, said the French minister of social affairs, health and women's rights, Marisol Touraine, on Saturday. That mother had lived in Brazil early in her pregnancy.

The CDC said on Friday that laboratory tests had confirmed separate cases in two women who had recently been in contact with an infected male.

More than 250 pregnant women in the United States, anxious they had been exposed to the Zika virus during their travels, have sought testing for the disease in recent months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. However, it remains uncertain that Zika is causing the brain disorder in infants.

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Health authorities there fear that 500 of these women would bear a child with microcephaly. However, there was no proof that the unborn baby actually had the brain disorder. The chemical abortion drug that the group is offering is for first-trimester abortions only - meaning that women taking the drug would have no way of knowing at that stage if their unborn baby had the disorder. All four lost pregnancies and the single case of birth with microcephaly occurred in this group of women.

"So far, we have not found any cases of microcephaly linked with Zika here", he said.

It was first named after the Ugandan forest where it was discovered in 1947 in the blood of a rhesus monkey, and the Zika virus has infected people on multiple continents ever since.

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