Yahoo! News: Colombia has more than 2,000 Zika cases in pregnant women

Bogota (AFP) - Colombia announced Saturday that more than 2,000 pregnant women in the South American country have been infected with the Zika virus, which is suspected of causing brain damage in newborns.

The National Health Institute reported that Colombia now has 20,297 cases of Zika infection, including 2,116 in pregnant women.

The latest numbers, reported in the institute's epidemiological bulletin, would make Colombia the second most affected country in the region, after Brazil.

Read more at Yahoo! News

Wired: Zika Virus May Push Latin America to Loosen Abortion Bans

A woman walks up a staircase through a fumigation cloud in Soyapango, El Salvador, on January 21, 2016, as the country tries to prevent the spread of the Zika virus by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.  MARVIN RECINOS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

With no vaccine and no cure, and without even a reliable diagnosis, doctors are at a loss for how to protect their patients from the Zika virus. In the past year, the mosquito-borne disease has spread throughout Latin America, sparking panic because of a possible link to microcephaly—babies born with abnormally small brains. Without more information, medical advice so far has boiled down to this: Don’t get pregnant. So say official guidelines from Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras. El Salvador has gone so far as to recommend women do not get pregnant until 2018.

But most of these Latin American countries are also Catholic, so access to birth control is often poor and abortion is flat-out banned. “This kind of recommendation that women should avoid pregnancy is not realistic,” says Beatriz Galli, a Brazil-based policy advisor for the reproductive health organization Ipas. “How can they put all the burden of this situation on the women?”

In Brazil, where Zika has hit the hardest, birth control is available—though poor and rural women can still get left out. One report estimates that unplanned pregnancies make up over half of all births in the country. And abortion is illegal, except in cases of rape and certain medical conditions. A raft of impending legislation in Brazil’s conservative-held congress may make it harder to get abortions even in those exempted cases.

Now throw Zika into that. Scientists still haven’t confirmed the link to microcephaly, but Brazilian researchers have confirmed the virus can jump through the placenta from mother to fetus. Circumstantially, the number of of microcephaly cases has gone up 20 fold since Zika first reached Brazil. In the face of fear and incomplete information, women will have to figure out how to protect themselves and their children.

Read the rest at Wired.com

NY Times: 11 Short Answers to Hard Questions About Zika Virus

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned pregnant women against travel to several countries in the Caribbean and Latin America where the Zika virus is spreading. Infection with the virus appears to be linked to the development of unusually small heads and brain damage in newborns. Some pregnant women who have been to these regions should be tested for the infection, the agency also says. Here are some answers and advice about the outbreak.

11 questions and 11 answers about Zika

BBC: Zika virus could become 'explosive pandemic'

US scientists have urged the World Health Organisation to take urgent action over the Zika virus, which they say has "explosive pandemic potential".

Writing in a US medical journal, they called on the WHO to heed lessons from the Ebola outbreak and convene an emergency committee of disease experts.

They said a vaccine might be ready for testing in two years but it could be a decade before it is publicly available.

Zika, linked to shrunken brains in children, has caused panic in Brazil.

Thousands of people have been infected there and it has spread to some 20 countries.

Would it be wrong to eradicate mosquitoes?

The Brazilian President, Dilma Roussef, has urged Latin America to unite in combating the virus.

She told a summit in Ecuador that sharing knowledge about the disease was the only way that it would be beaten. A meeting of regional health ministers has been called for next week.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Daniel R Lucey and Lawrence O Gostin say the WHO's failure to act early in the recent Ebola crisis probably cost thousands of lives.

They warn that a similar catastrophe could unfold if swift action is not taken over the Zika virus.

Read the rest at BBC.co.uk

Zika virus Fact sheet by World Health Organisation

Zika virus

Fact sheet
Updated January 2016

Key facts

• Zika virus disease is caused by a virus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes.
• People with Zika virus disease usually have a mild fever, skin rash (exanthema) and conjunctivitis. These symptoms normally last for 2-7 days.
• There is no specific treatment or vaccine currently available.
• The best form of prevention is protection against mosquito bites.
• The virus is known to circulate in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific.

Link to the rest of the factsheet

The Guardian: Zika virus spreading 'explosively', says World Health Organisation

The World Health Organisation has convened an emergency committee to discuss the “explosive” spread of the Zika virus, which has been linked to thousands of birth defects in Latin America.

“Last year the disease was detected in the Americas, where it is spreading explosively,” Margaret Chan, the WHO director general, said at a special briefing in Geneva. It was “deeply concerning” that the virus has now been detected in more than 20 countries in the Americas, she added.

The spread of the virus has prompted governments across the world to advise pregnant women against going to the areas where it has been detected. There is no vaccine or cure for Zika, which has been linked to microcephaly, a serious condition that can cause lifelong developmental problems.

Chan said: “The level of alarm is extremely high. Arrival of the virus in some cases has been associated with a steep increase in the birth of babies with abnormally small heads.”

Read the rest of this article at The Guardian

A new blog about the Zika virus

Today, thursday 28  january 2016, the World Health Organisation warned that the Zika virus could become an 'explosive pandemic'. From today this blog will follow the news about the global spreading of the Zika virus. We'll try to stick to facts and will try to debunk myths, rumours and exaggerations. Feel free to comment and add information.