‘Poverty favours the mosquito’: experts warn Zika virus could return to Brazil

'Poverty favours the mosquito': experts warn Zika virus could return to Brazil

Two months after government says Zika emergency at an end, water shortages and weak health system trigger fears of fresh outbreak

Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Friday 14 July 2017

Weaknesses in the public health system risk another Zika epidemic in Brazil, according to a report published two months after the government declared the mosquito-borne virus was no longer an emergency.

Blamed for the birth defect microcephaly, Zika exposed human rights deficiencies in areas such as sanitation, access to clean water, poverty and sexual health restrictions, the report released on Thursday by Human Rights Watch said.

Continued at source: The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jul/14/poverty-favours-the-mosquito-experts-warn-zika-virus-could-return-to-brazil


U.S.: Zika poses even greater risk for birth defects than was previously known, CDC reports

Zika poses even greater risk for birth defects than was previously known, CDC reports
By Lena H. Sun
April 4, 2017

About 1 in 10 pregnant women infected with Zika in the United States last year had a baby or fetus with serious birth defects, according to a study released Tuesday that represents the largest and most comprehensive study of Zika’s consequences for pregnant women.

Women infected during the first trimester of pregnancy had an even higher risk of birth defects, about 15 percent, according to the analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Continued at source: Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/04/04/zika-poses-even-greater-risk-for-birth-defects-than-was-previously-known-cdc-reports/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1


Brazil: The panic is over at Zika’s epicenter. But for many, the struggle has just begun.

The panic is over at Zika’s epicenter. But for many, the struggle has just begun.
By Marina Lopes and Nick Miroff
February 7, 2017

RECIFE, Brazil — In this city at the heart of the Zika outbreak, the gloom and dread have lifted from maternity hospitals and delivery rooms.

The scary government posters with giant mosquitoes have mostly come down. Fertility clinics are busy again. At one public hospital that has delivered 1,700 newborns over the past five months, doctors haven’t seen a single case of Zika-related birth defects.

Continued at source: Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-panic-is-over-at-zikas-epicenter-but-for-many-the-struggle-has-just-begun/2017/02/07/a1f15178-e804-11e6-acf5-4589ba203144_story.html


How the Response to Zika Failed Millions

How the Response to Zika Failed Millions
The New York Times
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Jan 16, 2017

Almost a year ago, the World Health Organization declared the Zika epidemic a global health emergency, calling for an epic campaign against a virus that few had ever heard of. As it spread to almost every country in the Western Hemisphere, scientists and health officials at every level of government swung into action, trying to understand how the infection caused birth defects and how it could be stopped.

The W.H.O. ended the emergency status in November, but the consequences of the outbreak will be with us for years to come. So maybe now is a good time to ask: How’d we do?

[continued at link]
Source: New York Times


Zika is driving up demand for abortion. Here’s why it shouldn’t.

Even infected women are far likelier to have healthy children than not.
By Christopher Landry November 22, Washington Post

Almost a year has passed since Brazilian health officials announced they had established a link between the mosquito-borne virus Zika and birth defects. Since the beginning of the outbreak of the Zika virus in 2015 in Brazil and other Latin American countries, researchers have raised increasing alarm over the disease’s link to birth defects. The most severe of these defects is microcephaly, a condition in which children are born with head circumferences well below normal, with effects ranging from mild developmental delay to devastating cognitive and neurological impairment. While the exact mechanism by which Zika causes microcephaly in infants in utero is not yet known, a growing body of evidence supports the link between the virus and the defect. According to a recent published review of evidence to date, “data from Brazil regarding the temporal and geographic association between Zika virus infection and the later appearance of infants with congenital microcephaly are compelling.” Given the severity of many microcephaly cases, governments and health organizations have raced to gather and distribute information that will help women facing the virus.

[continued at link]
Source: Washington Post


Scientists are bewildered by Zika’s path across Latin America

By Dom Phillips and Nick Miroff October 25 at 3:24 PM, Washington Post

RIO DE JANEIRO — Nearly nine months after Zika was declared a global health emergency, the virus has infected at least 650,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including tens of thousands of expectant mothers.

But to the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil.

[continued at link]
Source: Washington Post


Thailand: Abortion legal for Thai birth defect cases linked to Zika, officials say

Thu Oct 6, 2016 | 3:51am EDT

By Amy Sawitta Lefevre | BANGKOK, Reuters

Predominantly Buddhist Thailand will relax its strict rules against abortion to cover fetuses with proven birth defects linked to the Zika virus, health officials said on Thursday, doubling to 24 weeks a deadline for the procedure.

Thailand last week confirmed its first known cases of microcephaly linked to the mosquito-borne virus. The two cases of the birth defect marked by a small head were the first in Southeast Asia, following Zika outbreaks in the Americas

Health experts who met this week to draft guidelines for expectant mothers with Zika concluded that abortions can be carried out at up to 24 weeks in case of serious birth defects.

[continued at link]
Source: Reuters


Florida: I’m an OB-GYN treating women with Zika: This is what it’s like

FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2016, file photo, a female Aedes aegypti mosquito acquires a blood meal on the arm of a researcher at the Biomedical Sciences Institute in the Sao Paulo's University in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (AP Photo/Andre Penner, File)

Thursday, Aug 11, 2016 01:58 AM PST

Salon.com

There is no percentage for how many pregnant women who are infected with Zika will have babies with brain problem

Christine Curry, The Conversation

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

As a medical student, I remember reading books about the early days of the HIV epidemic and wondering what it was like for doctors to take care of patients who had a new, unknown disease. It seemed to me like it would be frightening for both patients and doctors alike. I didn’t expect that early in my career as an OB-GYN, I would be caught in the middle of another new disease outbreak — Zika.

Most people who catch this virus feel fine. Some will end up with a fever, rash, aches and red eyes (conjuntivitis), or rarely, a serious nerve disorder called Guillain-Barre. But in pregnancy there can be very serious consequences to the baby. As of July 28, the World Health Organization reports that nearly 2,000 babies are affected with microcephaly or central nervous system malformations associated with Zika worldwide.

I teach and practice obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Miami Hospital and Jackson Memorial Hospital, and I treat pregnant women who have been infected with Zika — so far over a dozen women. We began preparing to care for infected women in January. Now, it is part of the daily care we provide. And with first known cases of local mosquito-borne transmission in the continental United States reported in Wynwood, a neighborhood in Miami, the risk has become even more real.

How am I, and other doctors who care for pregnant women, dealing with this new disease?

[continued at link]
Source: Salon.com


Before Zika: The virus that helped legalize abortion in the US

CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/09/health/rubella-abortion-zika/

By Jessica Ravitz, CNN

Updated 6:13 PM ET, Tue August 9, 2016

Story highlights:

More than 50 years before Zika hit the US, the rubella virus affected pregnancies
The rubella, or German measles, epidemic helped legalize abortion in the US

(CNN) More than half a century before the Zika virus grabbed international headlines and photos of newborns with abnormally small heads were splashed across our screens, a different outbreak that affected pregnancies fueled change in the United States.
It was an epidemic that predated the birth of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who made waves this weekend when he said pregnant women infected with the Zika virus should not have the right to an abortion, even if there's a significant chance their babies will be born with microcephaly.

It was an epidemic that helped legalize abortion, the very right Rubio fights against.

[Continued at link]
Source: CNN.com


Zika emergency pushes women to challenge Brazil’s abortion law

Women’s groups are set to challenge the law in the hope of making termination possible for women at risk of delivering a baby born with Zika-related defects

Women’s groups in Brazil are set to challenge the abortion laws this summer in the hope of making a safe and legal termination possible for women at risk of delivering a baby born with defects after exposure to the Zika virus.

“Women should be able to decide and have the means to terminate pregnancies because they are facing serious risks of having babies with microcephaly and also suffering huge mental distress during their pregnancies. They should not be forced to carry on their pregnancies under the circumstances,” said Beatriz Galli, a lawyer on bioethics and human rights who works for Ipas, a group dedicated to ending unsafe abortion.

Lawyers for the organisations will present a legal challenge at the supreme court in the first week of August, when the court sits again after the winter break. They are co-ordinated by Anis Instituto de Bioética, which campaigns for women’s equality and reproductive rights.

The groups have obtained an opinion from lawyers at Yale University in the US, who argue that the Brazilian government’s policies on Zika and microcephaly have breached women’s human rights. The government “has failed to enact adequate measures to ensure that all women have access to comprehensive reproductive health information and options, as required by Brazil’s public health and human rights commitments”, says a review from the Global Health Justice Partnership, which is a joint initiative of the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Public Health.It is also critical of Brazil’s handling of the epidemic. Its “failure to ensure adequate infrastructure, public health resources and mosquito control programmes in certain areas has greatly exacerbated the Zika and Zika-related microcephaly epidemics, particularly among poor women of racial minorities”, the review says.

As of 7 July, there have been 1,638 cases of reported microcephaly – an abnormally small head – and other brain defects in Brazil, according to the World Health Organisation. Women who do not want to continue their pregnancy because they have been infected, even if they have had a scan confirming brain defects in the baby, are unable to choose a legal termination. There is evidence of a rise in early abortions using pills obtainable online and fears that unsafe, illegal abortions will be rising too.

Galli said there were already about 200,000 hospitalisations of women who have undergone a clandestine termination every year, and a suspected 1 million illegal abortions before the epidemic. “We know that there are clinics operating in the very low-income poor settings in Rio and women are paying a lot of money and are risking their lives,” she said.

Campaigners who want to change the law are encouraged by a ruling the supreme court handed down in the case of babies with anencephaly in 2012. This is a condition where the foetus develops without a brain, making it impossible for the baby to be born alive. The case took eight years, but eventually the court voted eight to two in favour of making abortion legal in those circumstances.

Before the ruling, there were two exceptions to the ban on termination in Brazil – when the pregnant woman’s life was at risk and when she had been raped. Anencephaly became the third, but campaigners acknowledge that it is not a simple precedent.

Debora Diniz, co-founder of Anis and professor of law at the University of Brasilia, said she was confident the court would understand that the situation is an emergency. They were not asking for the legalisation of abortion, she said, but “to have the right to abortion in the case of Zika infection during the epidemic”.

“It is not an abortion in the case of foetal malformation. It is the right to abortion in case of being infected by the Zika virus, suffering mental stress because you have this horrible situation and so few answers on how to plan and have a safe pregnancy,” she said.

Campaigners have five demands: good information for women in pregnancy, improvements in access to family planning, giving women mosquito repellents, better social policies to help children born with birth defects because of Zika and financial support for parents.

Diniz points out that the worst hit are the poor. “The feeling in my well-to-do neighbourhood [in Brasilia] is that everything is fine,” she said. People have never met a woman with Zika or seen a baby with neurological defects. But when she goes to clinics in hard-hit areas such as Campina Grande in the north-east, everything revolves around Zika.

“We have two countries in one country,” she said. “This is an emergency of unknown women. The trouble is they were unknown before the epidemic. I’m not being an opportunist. We have an epidemic and the epidemic shows the face of Brazilian inequality.”

Source: The Guardian