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Coppershot wrote:Zika is now a STDConfirmation that the Zika Virus can be spread as an STD was found in Dallas, Texas, when an unnamed person was infected by means of sexual contact with someone who had recently visited one of the countries where the virus is picking up speed.
The Zika virus has now seen millions of cases worldwide, a large portion of which are in the South American country of Brazil. Its neighbors, like Argentina and Venezuela, have also seen an alarming spread in their tropical regions where mosquitoes flourish. The possibility of Zika being an STD could, however, expand its reach even further as vacationers return to their home countries and unknowingly spread the virus.
http://www.inquisitr.com/2761534/zika-virus-confirmed-as-std-in-u-s-dallas-texas-resident-suffers-infection-by-sexual-contact/
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/02/health/zika-virus-sexual-contact-texas/
K74T wrote:Virus was contracted locally.
Zӧne Man wrote:ZIKA IS A PLOT BY THE GOVERNMENTS TO FIGHT DOWN THE POOR PEOPLE
Friday, February 19, 2016
T&T first Zika case from Diego...
Insect Vector Control Division authorities handling the Zika threat are today spraying areas of St George West, including a residential area in Diego Martin, where T&T’s first official Zika case was discovered, Health Ministry officials confirmed yesterday.
On Wednesday, Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh, while on a spraying tour in South, announced T&T had recorded its first official Zika case after laboratory tests.
He said the country’s first case was a woman, age 61, who had returned recently from a visit to New Zealand, where there were no reported cases of Zika.
She presented symptoms of the virus on February 10 and testing was done February 12.
Deyalsingh said the case was confirmed by the Caribbean Public Health Agency and investigations would begin to determine how the woman contracted the virus. He added she was at her home recovering but did not state where she lived.
But senior health and municipal corporation officials yesterday confirmed the first Zika case was recorded in St George West, in a particularly thickly populated western residential community of Diego Martin.
The T&T Guardian obtained the name of the community but officials said due to patient confidentiality they preferred that the name of the area not be publicised.
They said that had initially been done with the Chikungunya episode and only when that virus became widespread were the areas in which it was occurring detailed.
Insector Vector officials initially visited the particular Diego Martin community yesterday to begin spraying but many residents were not at home.
As such, they sent out email notification through the Diego Martin Regional Corporation (DMRC) and will return to the community today to start the exercise.
The email, however, advised residents who had young children, were pregnant or had a serious illness to vacate the area during the spraying.
It also advised the residents to cover birds and food items and to turn off air conditioning units if they planned to stay inside, since that could trap the fog inside rooms and be harmful.
The T&T Guardian learned that residents of that area were also trying to get the DMRC to clean drains and have also alerted all residents to flush out gutterings, plant pots and other possible mosquito breeding spots.
A schedule of spraying is also expected to be announced for other St George West areas over the coming days.
Deyalsingh didn’t answer calls last night but is expected to give an update on the Zika issue today.
After spreading to 21 countries, including Caribbean states—neighbouring Venezuela, Guyana, Barbados and Suriname—Jamaica recorded its first Zika case over two weeks ago.
Zika, the latest mutation of the influenza virus, is borne by the aedes aegypti mosquito. It is reported to have milder symptoms than the chikungunya virus.
However, in Brazil where 1.5 million cases have been reported, there have been claims the virus is linked to microcephaly, newborn babies with abnormally small heads and brains.
Investigations are also underway on claims of links with the Guillain-Barre Syndrome, an auto immune condition involving nerve cells, causing muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis and death.
At a UWI health symposium on Zika and H1N1 recently, UWI molecular genetics/virology professor Dr Christine Carrington said Zika may already be in T&T undetected, since it had mild symptoms and people might not go to hospitals for that.
She said, however, that causative basis with microcephaly and Guillain-Barre Syndrome have yet to be firmly established. However, Carrington agreed pregnant women should be cautious. Saying mosquito eradication was necessary, she said Zika was not a threat to a healthy person who is not pregnant.
Deyalsingh at the symposium distanced himself from the possibility of abortions for a pregnant woman who may get the Zika virus.
If such a woman wanted an abortion, they would have to consider that T&T’s law only allowed abortion if the mother’s life was in danger, he added.
Also at the symposium, Deyalsingh said businesspeople had suggested using genetically modified mosquitoes to destroy the aedes aegypti but he said the risks of introducing such a species was unknown and it would require 2.8 million such mosquitoes to destroy 20,000 female aedes aegypti.
Two days ago, the World Health Organization confirmed it’s looking at “novel approaches” to control mosquitoes known to spread the infection, including research into genetically modified (GM) insects.
While Brazil has expressed interest in that option, Dominica recently vetoed it. An Indian company also said it has two Zika vaccine candidates ready for pre-clinical trials.
First Zika-linked birth defects detected in Colombia
Cases may signal start of anticipated wave of birth defects in country hit hard by Zika virus.
Declan Butler
04 March 2016
Researchers have found Colombia's first cases of birth defects linked to the Zika virus, Nature has learned — which are likely forerunners of a widely anticipated wave of Zika-related birth defects in the country.
The discovery is perhaps no surprise: the virus arrived in Colombia last September, and the country is second only to Brazil in terms of the number of people infected with Zika.
But Colombian researchers hope that plans put in place to closely monitor pregnant women can help to better establish the magnitude of the threat posed to fetuses by Zika. That is a crucial question that scientists have not so far been able to answer with the data from Brazil.
Zika researchers release real-time data on viral infection study in monkeys
Researchers have diagnosed one newborn with microcephaly — an abnormally small head — and two others with congenital brain abnormalities, says Alfonso Rodriguez-Morales, who chairs the Colombian Collaborative Network on Zika (RECOLZIKA), which made the diagnoses. All three tested positive for the presence of Zika virus. The researchers have submitted a report of their detections to a scientific journal.
Rodriguez-Morales, an infectious-diseases epidemiologist at the Technological University of Pereira in western Colombia, says that he expects to see a rise in cases of Zika-linked birth defects starting in two or three months' time. The RECOLZIKA group — a network of researchers and public-health institutions across Colombia — are already investigating a handful of other suspected cases of microcephaly, which have a possible link to Zika.
The next wave?
Brazil is the only country so far to report a large surge in newborns with microcephaly that coincides with outbreaks of Zika virus. By the time the alarm over a possible microcephaly link was raised there (in October 2015), Zika infections had already peaked in many parts of the country, because the virus first reached Brazil at the beginning of last year.
In Colombia, by contrast, researchers detected the first Zika cases in September, and by December had set up national tracking programmes to monitor pregnant women for signs of infection, and to spot early signs of birth defects in fetuses. Since then, researchers have been waiting attentively to see whether their country might experience a similar rise in birth defects.
The true size of Brazil's surge in microcephaly cases is unknown. The country's health ministry says that 5,909 suspected microcephaly cases have been registered since early November, but only 1,687 of them have been investigated so far. Of those, 1,046 have been discarded as false positives, and 641 have been confirmed. (A link with the Zika virus has been confirmed by molecular-lab tests in 82 cases.)
Proving Zika link to birth defects poses huge challenge
Given that Brazil reported only 147 cases of microcephaly in 2014, the reported increase in cases since November suggests a marked rise in the number of babies born with the condition. But the 2014 figure is a “huge underestimate”, says Lavinia Schüler-Faccini, a geneticist who specialises in birth defects at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and president of the Brazilian Society of Genetic Medicine. She says that according to the frequency of microcephaly typically observed in regions around the world, one would expect to see 300–600 cases of severe microcephaly in any given year in Brazil, and around 1,500 less-severe ones.
The search for cases of microcephaly in Brazil since October is probably turning up many mild cases that previously went unnoticed — so that the reported surge looks higher than it really is. Still, Schüler-Faccini and other clinicians say there is a real problem. They have observed first-hand a marked increase in the number of unusually severe cases of microcephaly, they say.
To be prepared to better interpret any imminent peak in birth defects in Colombia, RECOLZIKA plans to look at historical cases to establish a baseline for the annual numbers of birth defects in different regions. It is also setting up a study to analyse patterns in the distribution of head-circumference measurements recorded in obstetrics units regionally throughout the country, to get a better idea of the local range of normal values.
Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images
A pregnant woman holds a mosquito net — delivered by Colombia's health ministry to ward off Zika virus infection — in Santiago de Cali, Colombia.
Zika's link to microcephaly
It has also not been possible so far from Brazilian data to quantify the extent to which Zika virus is linked to the rise in microcephaly. The latest data from Brazil's ministry of health show that increased cases of microcephaly and/or congenital malformations of the central nervous system are still concentrated in the northeast — raising questions as to whether other factors, perhaps specific to this region, might also be in play.
Clinical evidence leaves little doubt that a link between Zika and microcephaly exists: the virus has been detected in amniotic fluid, in the cerebrospinal fluid of affected babies and in the brains of stillborn fetuses and those aborted after the detection of severe malformations during pregnancy.
Spectre of Ebola haunts Zika response
But there are also many other possible causes of microcephaly, including a group of infections that are collectively called STORCH (syphilis, toxoplasmosis, other infections, rubella, cytomegalovirus infection and herpes simplex), which are known to cause birth defects. Exposure to toxic chemicals and the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy can also cause the condition.
“There is a clear need for a full assessment of other detailed causes of microcephaly, such as STORCH, and even non-infectious causes,” says Rodriguez-Morales. Brazil’s health ministry has stated that it is carrying out tests for such causes, but it has not made public how many of the confirmed microcephaly cases are attributable to these.
Healthy comparisons
A key question in assessing the scale of the threat that Zika may pose to fetuses is how many pregnant women infected with Zika — in particular during the first trimester, when the fetus is most vulnerable — nonetheless give birth to healthy babies. RECOLZIKA researchers hope to help to answer this through their monitoring programme.
The risk posed by Zika may well be lower than that of other diseases that are known to cause microcephaly such as toxoplasmosis and rubella, says Rodriguez-Morales. That is a preliminary estimate, he says, based on back-of-the-envelope calculations of the reported numbers of confirmed cases of microcephaly and congenital disorders, compared to the number of pregnant women in regions experiencing Zika epidemics.
Maternal health: Ebola’s lasting legacy
But even if its risk does turn out to be low, Zika could still lead to many cases because a large number of pregnant women in the Americas are likely to become infected with the virus.
The biggest risk to pregnant women is right now, rather than in the long term. The epidemic is sweeping so quickly through the Americas that much of the population, including young women, will become naturally vaccinated by their exposure to the virus. As population immunity increases, the Zika epidemic is likely to fade quickly, and it will become endemic with only occasional flare ups.
In a modelling study posted to the preprint server bioRxiv1 on 29 February, US researchers noted that the risk of prenatal Zika virus exposure “should decrease dramatically following the initial wave of disease, reaching almost undetectable levels”.
Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19502
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