Features, Science

Zika virus continues to spread, reported in Boston

Despite international panic about the spread of the Zika virus, Anita Barry, director of the Infectious Disease Bureau at the Boston Public Health Commission, said she believes Boston won’t “see much local transmission.” PHOTO COURTESY WIKIMEDIA
Despite international panic about the spread of the Zika virus, Anita Barry, director of the Infectious Disease Bureau at the Boston Public Health Commission, said she believes Boston won’t “see much local transmission.” PHOTO COURTESY WIKIMEDIA

The World Health Organization announced Thursday that the Zika virus is “spreading explosively” throughout the Americas and could potentially affect about four million people by the end of the year. Reaching the Internet, television and newspapers, the news of the Zika virus seems as far-reaching as the disease itself. Many in Boston are now increasingly worried of the virus spreading throughout the state after one case was reported in Boston, according to a Thursday release from the Boston Public Health Commission.

The Zika virus disease, transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes in tropical and subtropical regions of the world, is a mild illness that causes fever, muscle aches, rash, and pink eye. Brazil has confirmed as many as 4,000 cases of babies born with microcephaly in correlation to a significant rise in the number of people infected with the Zika virus.

While the majority of the Aedes mosquitoes are located in South American countries, travelers to these countries can potentially bring the disease back home with them.

“Brazil is a country that … has very important ties with European and North American countries,” said Mauricio Lacerda Nogueira, deputy chief of the Department of Dermatologic Diseases, Infectious and Parasitic at the Faculdade de Medicina de São José do Rio Preto. “People are coming and going to Brazil everyday, so this transmission [is] all over the world.”

This has lead to an array of confirmed cases in the United States, including the Bostonian who had recently traveled to a region where the virus is active.

“I think that we will see more people who have Zika virus in Boston, but they will be travelers who went to places where Zika virus is currently circulating,” said Anita Barry, director of the Infectious Disease Bureau at the BPHC. “I don’t think we’re going to see much local transmission of Zika virus in Boston because the mosquitoes that transmit this virus are found in Boston only very rarely.”

For those who worry about a potential Zika virus outbreak in Boston, public health officials deem the event unlikely.

“It’s possible that [Boston] could today bring in some of these mosquitoes, but they won’t likely survive our winter,” said Richard Pollack, senior environmental public health officer and instructor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We do have other mosquitoes locally which do survive our winters, but they do not seem to be quite as efficient in transmitting the virus.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a level-two alert Jan. 15, signifying heightened precautions when traveling to regions where the disease is present.

“We recently completed some testing on some specimen that were sent to us from Brazil, and the results from those tests certainly represented the strongest link to date that there’s a possible association [between Zika virus and microcephaly],” said CDC spokesperson Tom Skinner.

In response to growing concerns over the possible link between the virus and microcephaly, the BPHC has quickly responded to avoid a statewide scare.

“If a woman is pregnant and has traveled to an area at high risk, there’s a whole series of guidelines that the CDC has developed that in Boston we sent out to obstetricians,” Barry said.

However, this still does not warrant reduced precautions, especially considering the strong association with life-altering birth defects. Pollack advises everybody to follow these safety measures.

“People should certainly pay attention to the information about how to travel safely, how to protect yourself, whether they’re at home or elsewhere and take those recommendations seriously,” he said.

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