7 News Belize

The Microcephaly Threat
posted (February 9, 2016)
But while there is only that one Texas case so far with sexual transmission, the greatest risk - as you heard earlier - is to pregnant women. Specifically, Zika has been linked to a terrible birth defect called microcephaly, which causes babies heads and brains to stop growing to full size.

In Brazil where the Zika outbreak is the most aggressive, 4,000 cases of microcephaly have been reported. Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control in the US has issued a first-of-its-kind travel advisory for Zika, asking pregnant women to consider postponing their visits to countries where the virus has been detected.

But Manzanero told us that more thorough research and testing needs to be done to confirm if Zika is directly linked to Microcephaly.

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Dir. of Health Services
"There is not an establishment direct link. There seems to be something that needs further investigation. Microcephaly if you notice has been primarily documented in a certain geographic area of Brazil. But I was having a discussion and if you also read some of the articles over the weekend, Colombia has close to 30,000 cases of zika, but they had not have any Microcephaly cases in that population. So even that would warrant further investigation why in a certain geographic area it was more. If there was any other factor and I don't think any other country outside of Brazil has had any cases of Microcephaly linked to zika."

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