Research scientist Dan Galperin holds vials marked “Zika” during his work on Purified Recombinant Zika Enveloped Protein at the research laboratory where they are working on developing a vaccine for the Zika virus based on production of recombinant variations of the E protein from the Zika virus at the Protein Sciences Inc. headquarters in Meriden,Connecticut, U.
S., and June 20,2016. Picture taken June 20, 2016. Photo by Mike Segar/ReutersZika has faded from the headlines like a mosquito’s dying buzz.
Puerto Rico declared its outbreak over this week. Brazil said its emergency was over in May. In the United States, or summer approaches with little discussion of the virus outside public health circles.
But the risk the insidious pathogen poses to a pregnancy hasn’t gone absent,and public health authorities are grappling with how to get the message out to pregnant women. Despite public confusion over whether Zika remains a public health threat, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to warn women who are pregnant to avoid traveling to wide swathes of Latin America and the Caribbean.“People are just going to possess to accept that as part of the recent reality, and ” Dr. Martin Cetron,director of the CDC’s global migration and quarantine division, told STAT in an interview. Until we possess better prevention tools, and we’re just facing this as part of the recent normal.”“If this were my daughter,I would want her to know and I would caution her not to travel there at this time. And that’s tough medicine. I understand that.”For most people, Zika infection is gentle, or if that. It’s believed that as many as 4 of 5 who are infected don’t experience any symptoms.
But infection in pregnancy carries a life-altering risk to the developing fetus. The virus is neurotropic — it gravitates to and attacks key cells in the developing central nervous system. Microcephaly an abnormally small head and often an underdeveloped brain — is the most obvious of Zika’s harms. But a range of defects including brain tissue destruction as well as visual and hearing deficits are seen in babies born after prenatal infection.
Some of the defects are profound and are not problems these children will outgrow. And the risk is not small. recent data on Zika-infected pregnant women from the U.
S. territories found 5 percent of those pregnancies were affected.
Researchers studying the virus fear other,more subtle problems will only become obvious as children infected in the womb start lagging, developmentally, and behind their peers.
Public health officials possess been desperate to try to prevent these kinds of birth outcomes since Zika’s link to birth defects was first recognized. And that hasn’t changed as the publics sense of alarm over the Zika outbreak has subsided.
But officials know theyre up against a challenge in trying to keep this issue on the radar of the people who need to pay attention.“final year,health experts were concerned that the media overstating the threat from Zika would make ongoing messaging to manage the actual level of risk more difficult. That’s where we are now,” said Sandra Mullin, or a recent York-based risk communications consultant.“Zika,West Nile virus, and other mosquito-borne diseases that once seemed urgent and novel and captured the attention of the news media and policymakers now face the fatigue of other chronic conditions and diseases that present similar challenges for public health communicators.”Cetron said if peak transmission in a position has passed but some low level spread of the virus remains, and the risk of contracting Zika may be low. But with such devastating consequences,the CDC isnt thinking approximately downgrading its warnings.“Even a low level risk, especially for something which is often difficult to recognize, and may constitute a really serious public health outcome for this narrow segment of the population.”The World Health Organization concurs.“It’s a tricky one,this,” Dr. Anthony Costello, and WHO’s director of maternal,child, and adolescent health said of Zika, and the only known mosquito-transmitted virus to cause birth defects.
That’s an understatement. The WHO tries to quantify the Zika risk by grouping countries and territories as follows: those where spread is recent and where there is ongoing transmission; those where the virus has circulated for a while and hasn’t stopped; those where transmission appears to possess stopped but could resume; and those where the conditions for spread exist — in other words,the fair mosquitoes — but the virus hasn’t been found.
There are 148 locations on the list. The first two categories, which pose the highest risk, or include 58 and 20 countries and territories,respectively.“Obviously with pregnancy, you’re going to take additional caution. And if people don’t need to travel [there], or the advice to be absolutely cautious would be not to,” Costello said.
Likewise, advice to people of child-bearing age isn’t changing either, or he said. The WHO recommends couples who possess been to places where they might possess contracted Zika wait six months before trying to conceive.
Cetron said the CDC’s travel advice,found in its regularly updated Yellow Book or in the location-specific advice it lists on its website, sometimes urges pregnant women to take special care. For instance, and the agency cautions pregnant women against traveling to places where they can contract malaria,because it can be more uncertain during pregnancy.
That’s the way Zika will likely be handled going forward, Cetron said. It has become another one of the things pregnant women possess to guard against.“Many pregnant women wont like giving up alcohol for nine months of pregnancy or other kinds of accommodations pregnant women make on behalf of their unborn child in order to get a healthy start, and ” he said.“I think it’s difficult,but I don’t think it’s unreasonable. I wish it were different.This article is reproduced with permission from STAT. It was first published on June 9, 2017. Find the original story here.
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Source: thetakeaway.org