Brazil Olympic venues to be checked daily to help stop Zika

Women who are pregnant or who many be considering becoming pregnant may be wondering what their sphere of worry should be – namely, if their co-worker gets back from a Caribbean vacation, should they be anxious? And for most people who get infected, the flu-like symptoms will clear up in about a week.

The growing concern has caused El Salvador to recommend women hold off on pregnancy until 2018, and, in the USA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel alert for women of childbearing age, telling them to avoid countries with Zika, according to the BBC. Symptoms of the virus include fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes and can last from a few days to about a week.

Travelers who go to Zika-affected countries could bring the virus to the U.S, where this could be transmitted to mosquitoes that feed on the blood of those infected.

There is now no vaccine available for the virus, so only the symptoms can be treated.

Hospitalisation due to the virus is not common, while deaths are rare.

The large outbreak in Brazil, which began in May 2015, is particularly worrisome because the number of cases of congenital microcephaly in newborns and stillborns has abruptly increased.

“The mayor’s office will be intensifying inspections for the Olympics in August, despite this being a period with lower numbers of mosquitoes”, City Hall said in a statement today. A year ago the country saw only 147 cases of microcephaly. Researchers have yet to weigh in on a connection between symptomless pregnant women with Zika and infant microcephaly, but there is still an elevated risk.

Currently, 22 areas in Latin America and the Caribbean have active Zika virus transmission.

They are Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Saint Martin, Samoa, Surinam and Venezuela.

“For almost 30 years the mosquito has been transmitting these illnesses to our population and since then we’ve been fighting, but we are losing the war”, he was quoted as saying by Brazil’s G1 news site.

Travel warnings about the Zika virus, especially for pregnant women, are very much in the news now, but the germ was discovered more than a half century ago, and you may have already visited places where it flourishes.

Health officials confirmed yesterday that three people in New York State have tested positive for the Zika virus. That same year, Australia also reported a case of Zika fever in a returning citizen from Indonesia. The dark purple indicates “Locally-acquired cases or virus isolation”, while the lighter, dotted areas indicate “Serosurvey data only”.

On Jan 15, the United States announced its first case of the virus when a baby born with brain damage in a Hawaii hospital was confirmed as having been infected by Zika.