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What is the Zika Virus?

Posted on: 05/Feb/2016 5:48:49 PM
A world wide alert about the Zika virus has been latest on everyone`s news radar. This epidemic of the mosquito borne illness is believed to have begun in Brazil in May last year. It has spread through Central and South America and has slowly crept into the United States. 

Pregnant women have been issued a travel advisory by the U.S. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention to consider postponing any travel to more than 24 countries and territories. Most of these places are situated in Latin America and the Caribbean. The disease is linked to birth defects, and so, pregnant women must talk to there doctors before travel and make sure to follow steps to avoid mosquito bites. There have been about 48 confirmed cases of Zika in the US. In one case, the disease was sexually transmitted. 

So what is the Zika virus? It is transmitted through bites from the Aedes mosquito. These mosquitoes also cause dengue and chikangunya. It can be transmitted when a mosquito bites someone who is infected and then bites someone else. 

The most common symptoms of Zika virus are fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis. Other symptoms can include muscle pain, headache, pain behind the eyes, and vomiting. Symptoms are usually mild, lasting from a few days to a week. Some Zika patients in Brazil have developed an auto immune disease called Guillain Barre syndrome, which can cause at least temporary paralysis. More research is being done about this connection.

Unfortunately, there its no vaccine to prevent the Zika virus.  According to an official of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US, It is important to understand we will not have a widely available safe and effective Zika vaccine this year and probably not in the next few years. 

The Zika virus has been linked to babies being born with a condition called microcephaly, or abnormally small heads. This, most often, results in mental retardation. More than 4,000 babies have been born with microcephaly since the current outbreak. A professor at the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston explains, First we saw a dramatic rise in microcephaly in Brazil coinciding with when Zika was introduced there. This prompted an active search to see if there was a virus behind it and Zika was one of the suspect viruses, even though it was not shown previously to cause congenital birth defects. The researchers there took blood samples and other tissue samples from these babies with microcephaly and found evidence of the virus in the samples. They also sampled the amniotic fluid of mothers who had babies with microcephaly and that really helped confirm the connection.