A female Aedes aegypti mosquito. Zika virus is carried by the mosquito
which thrives in tropical climates and can carry other diseases such as
yellow fever, dengue fever and chikungunya. PHOTO | REUTERS
By AFP
In Summary
The World Health Organization on Thursday advised
countries against accepting blood donations from people who have
travelled to regions affected by the Zika virus, as Spain announced
Europe's first known case of the disease in a pregnant woman.
With dozens of cases emerging in Europe and North America
from travellers returning from affected areas, WHO stressed the
potential link between Zika and microcephaly — which causes children to
be born with abnormally small heads — and urged health authorities to
take precautions.
"With the risk of incidence of new infections of
Zika virus in many countries, and the potential linkage of the Zika
virus infection with microcephaly and other clinical consequence, it is
estimated as an appropriate precautionary measures to defer (blood)
donors who return from areas with Zika virus outbreak," WHO spokesman
Tarik Jasarevic told AFP.
Meanwhile, in the first case of its kind in Europe,
Spain's health ministry said a pregnant woman who had returned from
Colombia had been diagnosed with the virus.
"One of the patients diagnosed in (the northeastern
region of) Catalonia is a pregnant woman, who showed symptoms after
having travelled to Colombia," the ministry announced, adding that she
was one of seven cases in Spain.
The 41-year-old woman, of Latin American origin who
lives in Spain, is 13 or 14 weeks pregnant, regional health official
Joan Guix told a news conference.
She will undergo detailed medical tests to see if
there is a risk to the foetus. Guix said there was only a small
possibility of problems and a scan at 15 weeks would show whether the
baby was developing normally.
The mosquito-borne virus has so far spread to 26
countries in South and Central America and the Caribbean and health
authorities have warned it could infect up to four million people on the
continent and spread worldwide.
The disease starts with a mosquito bite and normally causes little more than a fever and rash.
But since October, Brazil has reported 404 confirmed cases of microcephaly — up from 147 in 2014 — plus 3,670 suspected cases.
The timing has fuelled strong suspicions that Zika is causing the birth defect.
The virus has also been linked to a potentially paralysing nerve disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome in some patients.
'Imported cases'
Spain's health ministry sought to ease concerns
over the spread of the virus, pointing out that all seven cases in the
country had caught the disease abroad
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