Brazil Declares Emergency After 2,400 Babies Are Born With Brain Damage

The Brazilian health authorities on a virus from mosquitoes that call that they believe may be the cause of thousands of children are born with brain damage.



The pathogen, known as Zika forest and was discovered in monkeys in Africa for more than 70 years ago, is that a new West Nile virus, which causes mild symptoms in most people, but can lead to serious neurological complications and even the death of others. . Brazil's health ministry said on November 28 that he had found the Zika virus to the baby, as well as microcephaly - a rare condition in which a baby is born with shrunken skulls, during an autopsy after the baby died. The virus was also detected in the amniotic fluid of mothers whose children had the condition.This is an unprecedented situation, unprecedented in the world of scientific research,' the ministry said in a statement on its website, according to CNN.Brazil investigates suspected cases of microcephaly and more than 2400 deaths of 29 children that have occurred this year. Last year the country has seen only 147 cases of microcephaly.The situation in Brazil is so overwhelming that Angela Rocha, a pediatric infectious disease specialist Pernambuco, one of the most affected countries, said in an interview with CNN that women may want to hold off getting pregnant.'These are children who need special attention throughout their life. And 'the emotional stress that I just can not imagine ....' Rocha said. 'We're talking about generations of children who will be affected.'Until a few years ago, human infections with the virus were almost unknown.Then, for reasons scientists can not explain, but I think I can do complex effects of climate change, has started to pop up in remote parts of the world. In 2007, it infected about three-quarters of the 11,000 inhabitants of the island of Yap.In 2013, he appeared Zika in Tahiti and other parts of French Polynesia and was responsible for about 28,000 people, the worse they sought medical help. And 'it arrived in Brazil in May, where tens of thousands of patients.World Health Organization, which has been carefully spread of the virus and has raised the alarm about the situation in Brazil, reported this month that appeared for the first time in the West African nation of Cape Verde, Panama and Honduras, which She has led to additional illnesses.In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a virus in travelers returning from abroad, but says he did not come across any cases of people becoming infected mosquitoes in the country.Brazil is already struggling to contain the virus for months, both through public information campaigns to encourage residents to use insect repelant and limit their time outdoors, as well as sending teams to eradicate mosquitoes from house to house to treat the places where Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which carry the virus can reproduce. The Ministry of Health has announced that it is sending truckloads of larvicide - enough to treat 3,560 Olympic-sized swimming pools - the north and countries of south-east worst affected, and that would add 266,000 new community health agents to make house calls.