Zika Virus hits Brazilian Children with Microcephaly

 

A doctor examines an infant born with microcephaly.

Angela Rocha, a pediatrician in northeastern Brazil, measures the head of a child born with microcephaly, a tragic neurological complication linked to Zika, the mosquito-borne virus sparking a health scare across the Americas.

Outside the room, seven mothers cradling infants with abnormally small heads line up for hours for tests. More than 1,000 cases of microcephaly have been reported in just a few months in Pernambuco state, the epicenter of the Zika outbreak.

“We were taken by surprise,” says Rocha, a veteran infectious disease specialist at the Oswaldo Cruz University in the state capital of Recife, where doctors are struggling to care for 300 babies born with the condition.

For a country that for years has battled the Aedes aegypti mosquito - responsible for previous epidemics of dengue, yellow fever and other tropical diseases - the outbreak of Zika has caught the government, public health administrators and doctors entirely off guard.

A tropical climate, dense cities, poor sanitation and slipshod construction provided ideal conditions for mosquito breeding grounds and the spread of the Zika virus in Brazil’s northeast, across the country and to more than 20 others throughout the Americas.

“We just didn’t have the conditions or resources necessary to stop the mosquito or the virus,” says Maria da Gloria Teixeira, an epidemiologist in the neighboring state of Bahia and a director of the Brazilian Association of Collective Health, a grouping of public health professionals.

Amid warnings from governments and multilateral health agencies, pregnant women in Brazil and beyond are now seeking to avoid exposure to the mosquito, at least until contagion is contained or scientists develop a vaccine, which could still take years.

Brazilian health officials this week said they plan to reach an agreement with the U.S. National Institutes of Health to work on a vaccine. Some Latin American countries have advised women to delay getting pregnant.