CDC confirms mosquito-borne virus linked to Jamaican microcephaly case

Confirmation has come that a baby, born recently at Victoria Jubilee Hospital with microcephaly, contracted the condition from a mosquito-borne virus.

The Ministry of Health in January sent samples to the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) and the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for testing. It has just received the results.

“I can state that the test from the CDC has confirmed a… virus, specifically Zika Virus and Dengue Virus,

Dr. Winston De La Haye, Chief  Medical Officer, in an interview with RJR News on Monday night, said the CDC had confirmed the presence of two viruses – Zika and Dengue.

“So what that means is there are two potential viruses in terms of causation and we can’t definitively say it’s Zika related, and so the case remains a probable Zika case of microcephaly,” he said.

CDC study

Meanwhile, a study conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that pregnant women infected with Zika are 20 times more likely to give birth to children with central nervous system birth defects, such as abnormally small heads.

Researchers compared data about early brain malformations, microcephaly, eye defects, and other central nervous system problems in babies born in 2013 – before Zika reached the US – to the children of mothers infected with Zika in 2016.

For healthy mothers, central nervous system birth defects appeared in about three of  every 1,000 live births.

By contrast, central nervous system abnormalities appeared in 60 infants and fetuses per 1,000 pregnancies when mothers were infected with Zika.