Aedes aegypti. Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Zika weighs heavily on my mind. I spoke to a friend in Venezuela recently. This is terrible example at baseline of social and economic disruption for political reasons. Her daily life is made up of queues for daily essentials like toilet paper; there is no tylenol available for anything. A big upsurge in malaria had already happened last year!
Add Zika. In her neighborhood, about a dozen cases of active Zika (clinically, there are no diagnostics), and two of them are pregnant women. Upsurge in Guillan Barre syndrome, for which they have no therapy other than support when available. This has not been reported to the WHO. The thousands of babies affected in the Americas raise the contrast to the lack of options for those who hear that pregnant women from the north are being told not to travel to their country. This is being played out across the Americas where the Aedes mosquito is present. While the first documented case of sexual transmission for this rare virus was published 5 years ago, now documentation from Texas in the context of an important epidemic raises all sorts of new questions. Is that an important method for expansion of the infection?
