Zika virus is considered an international public health emergency, and now threatening the Americas and other countries. The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals announced on Thursday that it is investigating two possible cases of Zika virus.
The health agency said that two samples taken from the individuals who traveled to the Caribbean tested positive for Zika. Though neither of the patients complained of being sick at all, the state laboratory requested the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct confirmatory tests.
As of Wednesday, the CDC reports about 52 travel-associated cases of Zika virus infection in the United States with no noted cases of locally-transmitted infection. In the state of Louisiana, the two cases are the first ones to be reported so far. CDC says that Louisiana is the 17th state to report travel-acquired Zika.
The state health agency launched a probe to determine other cases as several people traveled to the same region recently. Of the two cases, and several others being investigated, none of them are pregnant.
The Zika virus poses a detrimental health effect to pregnant women and their unborn baby. Recently, health agencies launched an investigation of the possible link between Zika virus and microcephaly, a birth defect that causes smaller brains in infants born to mothers who contracted the virus.
There is no definite conclusion on the association of the virus in the development of birth defects to unborn babies until an aborted fetus was found to have a complete genome of the Zika virus upon autopsy. Just like in other Zika-infected babies, the brain of the fetus was also small for its age and lacked the folds that are normally found on the surface of a normal brain.
Little information is still known about the virus, perhaps one of the important information is that it can be transmitted through its vector, the Aedes mosquitoes. Now, new modes of transmissions have emerged and have shown that the virus can also be transmitted through other probable means including sexual intercourse, kissing, and blood transfusion.
