Thread: Zika Virus May Have Spread To Common Mosquito

How many already infected pregnant women are coming across our border every day? Watch the SKY News videos at the link.

Zika Virus May Have Spread To Common Mosquito

Scientists in the epicentre of the Zika outbreak suspect the virus is being carried by another, more widespread mosquito.

11:06, UK,Thursday 28 January 2016

Play video "Species Jump Fears For Zika Virus"

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By Alex Crawford, Special Correspondent, in Recife

Scientists in Brazil believe the devastating Zika virus may have already crossed over to the common mosquito, dramatically increasing the risk of it spreading worldwide.

The Brazilian government is already struggling to contain a growing public health disaster.

There are suspicions the mosquito-borne virus is linked to more than 4,000 babies with brain deformities in South America's largest country.

The authorities have called troops out on to the street and deployed teams of health workers to try to combat the spread but so far those at the forefront admit they are nowhere near succeeding.

Up until now, it was thought the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is confined to the tropics, was solely spreading the virus.

But scientists at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Recife, Pernambuco State, in the northeast of the country, believe otherwise.
They say they are as little as a month away from confirming that the virus is also being carried and transmitted by the much more common Culex mosquito.

There are 20 times more Culex mosquitos in existence as the Aedes aegypti and they are significantly more widespread - breeding throughout most of the Americas, parts of Africa and Asia - so increasing the chances of the virus spreading.

The lead research scientist at the foundation, Constancia Ayres, told Sky News that if her suspicions are confirmed, the implications are huge.




Video: What Is The Zika Virus?

"It means much more combined efforts from a lot of other countries are going to be needed to combat this virus," she said.

Dr Vanessa Van Der Linden, from the Barao de Lucena Hospital in Recife, was the first person to spot a possible link between the Zika virus and a spike in the increase in microcephaly births, a dangerous condition where babies are born with abnormally small heads.

"I saw three cases of microcephaly in one day last August when normally I would see one maybe every three months," she said.
"It was very strange."



Play video "Zika Virus: Who's At Risk?"

She said so little was known about the virus and its effects, she and the other doctors were learning "as we go along".

The virus has no cure and no vaccine and although efforts have now been stepped up to develop one, it's far too late for the thousands already condemned to a lifetime of struggle - where their hearing and sight may be affected, where their brain development will be limited and their life expectancy shortened.

Dr Angela Rocha is from the Oswaldo Cruz University Hospital, which has seen more than 300 microcephaly cases in the last five months.

She said: "We just don't know much about this virus at all. The mothers ask me ,'Will it get better? Will my baby's head grow?'



Play video "The Breeding Ground Slums For Zika"

"And I have to tell them 'no, it's never going to get better'."
http://www.europeanguardian.com/plug...bound-migrants

It's just awful. This summer during mosquito season will be a nightmare. Just terrible.

Zika virus infection: woman returning to Texas from El Salvador confirmed positive - TomoNews



Published on Jan 13, 2016
HOUSTON — A woman who returned to the Houston area in Texas after a trip to El Salvador in November has a confirmed case of the Zika virus, Reuters reported, citing officials in Harris County.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, there have been 22 cases of the disease among returning U.S. travelers since 2007. Zika is transmitted by the Aedes genus of mosquito, which can also carry the dengue and chikungunya viruses. Zika causes a mild disease with fever, rash and joint pain. It is rarely fatal and can be cured with bed rest and liquids.

An epidemic of the Zika virus in Brazil, however, has prompted health officials to investigate thousand of cases of microcephaly in the country. Since microcephaly is usually a rare condition, health officials have suggested a link between the virus and the disease that causes an abnormally small head size and incomplete brain development.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Brazilian authorities estimate that 500,000 to 1.5 million people have been infected by the Zika virus in the country. In December, Puerto Rico confirmed its first locally acquired case of Zika virus, suggesting that the virus might be circulating there.

U.S. officials say they are preparing for a growing number of Zika cases in the spring and summer, when the weather creates ideal breeding conditions for the mosquitoes that carry the virus.

Outbreaks of the virus have also occurred in the past in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQeSyA6NeD0

Brits diagnosed with Zika virus after South America travel



Published on Jan 23, 2016
The disease, which has been linked to brain deformities in babies, is only transmitted from a mosquito bite, but could be passed on from mother to unborn child. The US has now warned pregnant women not to travel to 22 countries.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SkKUYNIMvk

Oh God, it's going world wide. Another global disaster. These poor babies and parents. Awful.

Zika Virus: Two Cases Suggest It Could Be Spread Through Sex

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
JAN. 25, 2016

Zika virus has already been linked to brain damage in babies and paralysisin adults. Now scientists are facing another ominous possibility: that on rare occasions, the virus might be transmitted through sex.

The evidence is very slim; only a couple of cases have been described in medical literature. But a few experts feel the prospect is disturbing enough that federal health officials should inform all travelers, not just pregnant women, of the potential danger.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, say the evidence is insufficient to warrant such a warning. While the two instances suggest a “theoretical risk” of sexual transmission, they note the primary vector is clearly mosquitoes.

Dr. Márcio Nehab, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Fiocruz, a research institute in Rio de Janeiro, said that much more research was needed to be done to definitively prove that Zika can be transmitted during sex.

“At the moment we need to be more concerned with the mosquito, the vector known for transmitting the virus,” Dr. Nehab said in an informationbulletin about Zika geared toward women and children.

The mosquito-borne Zika virus, linked to brain damage of infants in Brazil, is likely to spread to most of the countries in the Americas, the World Health Organization announced on Monday.

At the moment, experts know of just one case in the medical literature of live Zika virus being detected in a man’s semen.
The man was an unidentified 44-year-old Tahitian man, exposed during an outbreak of Zika virus in French Polynesia in 2013. French scientists helping to investigate found high levels of the virus in semen samples taken from the patient, even after it disappeared from his blood.

It was unclear how long the virus had persisted in his body: He had had two episodes of fever that might have been caused by the Zika virus, one shortly before he was tested and another about two months earlier. The virus was also found in his urine.
A more unusual episode — the first clue that Zika could be sexually transmitted — occurred in 2008.

Brian D. Foy, a biologist specializing in insect-borne diseases at Colorado State University, was in rural Senegal with a graduate student, Kevin C. Kobylinski, collecting mosquitoes for a malaria study. Both were bitten many times.
About a week after they flew back to Colorado, Dr. Foy and Mr. Kobylinski each fell ill with rashes, fatigue and headaches, symptoms typical of several mosquito-borne illnesses.

A few days later, Dr. Foy’s wife — Joy L. Chilson Foy, a nurse and mother of four — showed similar symptoms, slowly developing a rash worse than that of either man, along with greater headache pain and bloodshot eyes.



From left: Kevin Kobylinski, Massamba Sylla and Brian Foy in Senegal in 2008 with equipment for aspirating mosquitoes.

Dr. Foy became sick with Zika after returning to his home in Colorado, and most likely transmitted the virus to his wife sexually.All three eventually recovered. Late in his illness, however, Dr. Foy had genital pain and what appeared to be blood in his semen.
Blood was drawn from all three patients and tested for the usual West African suspects: malaria, dengue and yellow fever. All were negative.

Their infection remained a mystery until a year later, when Mr. Kobylinski, back in Senegal, met another scientist who suggested it could be Zika virus. The blood samples — which Dr. Foy had frozen — tested positive. That left the question of how Mrs. Foy had been infected.

She had not left northern Colorado, which has none of the mosquitoes that transmit Zika. And it seemed unlikely that she and her husband had been bitten by the same mosquito: The virus needs more than four days to move from the insect’s gut to its salivary glands.

Neither had passed the disease to their children, so even close family contact seemed noninfectious. The most likely explanation, the couple realized, was that they had had sex shortly after Dr. Foy’s return, before he fell ill.

Dr. Foy wrote about his experience in 2011 in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

In an interview, Dr. Foy said he had been trying to get research money to study the phenomenon, but there have been obstacles: Until the last few weeks, there has been little interest in the obscure virus.

Why scientists are worried about the Zika virus, and how to avoid it.



And Zika virus is hard to study, because it does not infect mice, rats or most other lab animals. It does infect monkeys, but that research is difficult, expensive and controversial. Colorado State does not have a monkey research colony, Dr. Foy said.

Dr. William Schaffner, chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical School, said it was imperative that research on possible sexual transmission of Zika be done in Brazil or another Latin American country experiencing an outbreak.

Two suspect cases “are not really enough to warrant a large public health recommendation from the C.D.C.,” he said. “But it’s provocative, so someone else could recommend it. And it certainly should be studied.”

Testing men for the virus in their semen should be easy, he added. After that, researchers should look for couples like the Foys, in which one partner had been in a mosquito-infested area and the other had been in a mosquito-free one.

“If I was a man and I got Zika symptoms, I’d wait a couple of months before having unprotected sex,” said Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and an expert on the virus. “If my wife was of childbearing age, I’d want to use protection, certainly for a few weeks.”

A spokeswoman for Brazil’s Health Ministry said studies about how Zika can be contracted need to be evaluated more closely. “These analyses need to be accompanied by scientific work so the Health Ministry can provide the population with safe advice about transmission of the virus,” the statement said.

On Monday, the Pan American Health Organization warned that Zika virus is likely to spread to every country in the Americas except Canada and Chile.

In the United States, C.D.C. experts have said they expect the disease to follow the same pattern as dengue: limited outbreaks in hot, wet regions including Florida and other states along the Gulf Coast and Hawaii, where the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, is common. They hope that aggressive mosquito control will contain the infection.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/he...rough-sex.html

Did they travel to or did they come from the Zika infected areas. The media is never truthful about anything that could possibly put "migrants" in a bad light. I will assume they are lying....JMO

Mosquito-Borne Zika Virus Found in 3 New York State Patients

By RICK ROJAS
JAN. 22, 2016

State health officials said on Friday that three people in New York State, including one from Queens, tested positive for Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that has prompted concern as it has spread rapidly, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean.

All three had traveled to places outside the United States where the virus had been spreading. Besides the person from New York City, the patients were from Nassau and Orange Counties. One person has fully recovered, and the two others are recovering without complications, according to a statement the State Health Department issued on Friday.

Health officials said the virus’s symptoms — including fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes — are typically mild and last up to a week. Some may not even realize they have been infected. About one in five people who have been bitten by an infected mosquito will grow ill, with symptoms usually appearing within a few days.

But health experts believe the virus can cause severe brain damage in infants, based on thousands of cases of infected babies born with unusually small heads. The situation has led American officials to advise pregnant women to delay traveling to any of nearly 30 countries and territories, including Puerto Rico, where mosquitoes are spreading the virus. Among the destinations are eight that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added on Friday.

In Brazil, doctors have linked the virus to a rare syndrome, Guillain-Barré, in which patients can be left almost completely paralyzed for weeks. Researchers say more studies are needed to prove the connection.

There are documented cases in the United States of travelers who contracted the virus abroad, but there have been no reported instances of its being transmitted inside the country, according to the C.D.C.

There is no vaccine or medication for the virus.

“There is virtually no risk of acquiring Zika virus in New York State at this time,” Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the state health commissioner, said in a statement, “as the virus cannot be spread by casual contact with an infected person and mosquitoes are not active in cold winter months.”

But Dr. Zucker urged travelers, particularly pregnant women, to check for health advisories and take preventive measures (like wearing long-sleeved shirts and using mosquito repellent) when traveling to countries where the virus is found.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/23/nyregion/mosquito-borne-zika-virus-found-in-3-new-york-state-patients.html?rref=collection%2Fnewseventcollectio n%2FZika%20Virus