Zika virus lands in U.S., bringing threat of widespread birth defects

U.S. health officials are starting to report cases of the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease connected with serious birth defects that is spreading rapidly through the Americas. A girl who traveled to El Salvador and back was the first case treated in Los Angeles County, officials there said Tuesday, and health workers have reported the virus in Texas, Arkansas, and Hawaii since the beginning of the year.

The Zika virus has blanketed 22 countries since May. The biggest concern with the outbreak is the risk to unborn babies whose mothers are infected. The symptoms of the virus are typically mild—fever, eye infection, joint pain, and headaches—and there is no risk of person-to-person contagion since the disease is transmitted via mosquito. But growing evidence links the virus to microcephaly, a rare neurological condition where babies are born with small heads and brains.

Health officials sounded the alarm in October after noticing a spike in cases of microcephaly in tandem with the Zika outbreak. In all of 2014, Brazil identified less than 150 cases of microcephaly. But since October, when health officials first began investigating the Zika link, the number of babies born with microcephaly rose to almost 4,000.

Brazilian neuro-pediatric hospitals have been flooded with microcephalic babies and perplexed mothers, The Guardian reported. “They keep asking me, ‘Is his head going to grow any more? He will get better, won’t he?’” pediatrician Angela Rocha said.

Brazil’s health officials are convinced the surge is connected to the vector virus, though the mechanics of how the virus might affect babies remain murky. “Although a causal link between Zika infection in pregnancy and microcephaly has not been established, the circumstantial evidence is suggestive and extremely worrisome,” said Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization.

This week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urged pregnant women to consider postponing travel to the 22 countries hit by the tropical disease, including Barbados, Honduras, and Mexico.

The governments of Jamaica, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Colombia went a step further, advising women to delay pregnancy plans for six months to two years until the Zika virus is out of the epidemic stage and more is known about the connection to birth defects.

But women’s rights activists say that approach will be ineffective. “It’s incredibly naive for a government to ask women to postpone getting pregnant in a context such as Colombia, where more than 50 percent of pregnancies are unplanned and across the region where sexual violence is prevalent,” Monica Roa, vice president of strategy for Women’s Link Worldwide, told Reuters. Countries like El Salvador have alarmingly high teenage pregnancy rates, with girls between the ages of 10 and 19 making up one-third of the pregnant population.

At this time, there is no treatment for the Zika virus. “We’ve got no drugs and we’ve got no vaccines. It’s a case of déjà vu because that’s exactly what we were saying with Ebola,” Trudie Lang, a professor of global health at the University of Oxford, told Reuters. “It’s really important to develop a vaccine as quickly as possible.”

But health officials say developing a vaccine could take at least three years. For now, the CDC recommends attacking the problem at the level of the vector by using insect repellent, exposing minimal skin, and emptying stagnant water.

The Associated Press contributed to this report