[The virus is with the baby]
Zika virus continues to spread across the Americas.
– The virus originated in Africa but was not believed to be dangerous to humans.
– Doctors are at a loss about how to combat the virus, which is poised to spread across the globe.
Scientists have called on the WHO to heed lessons from the Ebola outbreak and convene an emergency committee of disease experts to combat the Zika virus.
They said a vaccine might be ready for testing in two years but it could be a decade before it is publicly available.
Zika, linked to shrunken brains in children, has caused panic across the Americas.Thousands of people have been infected in Brazil alone and it has spread to some other 20 countries.
Dr Vanessa Van Der Linden, from the Barao de Lucena Hospital in Recife, was the first person to spot a possible link between the Zika virus and a spike in the increase in microcephaly births, a dangerous condition where babies are born with abnormally small heads.
“I saw three cases of microcephaly in one day last August when normally I would see one maybe every three months,” she said.
“It was very strange.”
The Zika virus was discovered in monkeys in 1947 in Uganda’s Zika Forest, with the first human case registered in Nigeria in 1954 but for decades it did not appear to pose much of a threat to people and was largely ignored by the scientific community.
It was only with an outbreak on the Micronesian island of Yap in 2007 that some researchers began to realise that the virus could be dangerous to humans.The symptoms in adults and children are similar to those for dengue fever but generally milder, including flu-like aches, inflammation of the eyes, joint pain and rashes although some people have no symptoms at all.
In rare cases the disease may also lead to complications including Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disorder of the nervous system which can cause paralysis
The Zika virus is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also carries dengue fever and yellow fever.
If a pregnant mothers is infected the baby will often be affected by microcephaly, which causes incurable brain damage.
Many people will not show any symptoms after being affected and there is no known cure. The only way to fight the virus is to protect against mosquito bites.