GEORGIA, United States, Monday August 8, 2016 – The Zika virus is spreading so quickly in Puerto Rico that it’s likely to infect one in four people, including up to 10,000 pregnant women, by the end of the year, according to Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The greatest danger from Zika is microcephaly, a condition in which infants are born with abnormally small heads and catastrophic brain damage. About 41 percent of pregnant women in Puerto Rico with symptoms of Zika — such as a rash, fever, joint pain, pink eye, headache — tested positive for the virus, Frieden said.
But only 20 percent of people with Zika develop symptoms, and about five percent of pregnant women with no Zika symptoms also tested positive for the virus, according to a CDC report.
Tests of the blood supply in the US island territory also indicate that the virus is widespread. About 1.8 percent of blood donations tested positive for Zika, meaning that the person who gave the blood was infected in the last week or so, according to the report.
“That may not sound like a lot, but it means that about 4 percent of people are being infected every month,” Frieden saidAccording to the report, tests also found that 21 people with Guillain-Barre syndrome — a condition in which a person’s immune system attacks the nerves of the body, causing paralysis — were infected with Zika.
A Puerto Rican man with Guillain-Barre syndrome died earlier this year after suffering a severe loss of platelets, the cells that help the blood clot. The condition can lead to people bleeding to death.
To date, about 5,582 people in Puerto Rico have been diagnosed with Zika, including 672 pregnant women, the CDC report said.In Puerto Rico, Zika appears to be following the same pattern seen with chikungunya, which arrived in the Western Hemisphere in 2013 and infected one in four Puerto Ricans, within a year, But while chikungunya can cause excruciating joint pain and other painful symptoms, it is not known to cause birth defects.
More than 1,600 people in the continental US have also been diagnosed with Zika, mostly as a result of travel to areas with outbreaks. Locally transmitted cases are a recent and unwelcome development in Florida.
Zika has affected 20 pregnancies in the US so far. Thirteen women in the US have given birth to babies with Zika-related birth defects; seven have lost pregnancies due to miscarriage or have aborted babies with brain damage.
Brazil has confirmed 1,749 cases of microcephaly related to Zika, according to the World Health Organization. Colombia has reported 21 cases of microcephaly; along with nine in Cape Verde, located off the coast of Africa; eight cases in Martinique; and five in Panama.
A handful of Zika-related microcephaly cases also have been reported in French Guiana, French Polynesia, the Marshall Islands and Paraguay.