The number of pregnant women in the United States and its territories who have been infected with the Zika virus has spiked dramatically in the past month because of a change in how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the data.
Based on the new reporting system, 279 women in the U.S. and Puerto Rico have been infected with Zika during their pregnancies. Some of the women were infected by sexual transmission, an alarming reminder that direct mosquito bites aren't the only way to contract the disease.
Since February, the CDC has monitored U.S. pregnant women infected with the Zika virus. For months the number of cases appeared to rise steadily and by April stood at 48 in the continental states. But that number, which the agency reported publicly, only reflected women who tested positive for the Zika virus and showed symptoms.
On Friday, the CDC announced it is now going to publicly report not only the number of pregnant women who test positive and show symptoms of the virus, but also pregnant women who display no symptoms but have shown laboratory evidence of possible exposure.
Researchers say the new system will create a better understanding of the range of problems the virus inflicts in utero.
Four out of five people who get Zika show no symptoms. Those who do develop a rash, sore joints, fever and conjunctivitis, which can last a week to 10 days. The mosquito-borne virus, however, remains in blood and semen much longer.
The CDC waited until now to report the greater number of affected women because of the rapid changes in what’s known about the disease’s impact on pregnancy, said Margaret Honein, chief of the CDC’s birth defects branch and co-lead of the Pregnancy and Birth Defects Team with the CDC Zika Virus Response Team.
“Our goal is to track all Zika-affected pregnancies,” said Honein. “We want to be transparent about the numbers of affected women.”
The change in public reporting will “give a more complete picture of the impact of Zika,” she said.
The change also reflects the insidious nature of a disease that has caused much of the American public to shrug, but has doctors and health officials alarmed. Concern is spreading.
On Friday the U.S. Olympic Swim Team announced it was moving its training camp from Puerto Rico, which has developed into a Zika stronghold, to Atlanta. Up to 20 percent of the island's 3.5 million people are expected to contract the virus, health officials have said.
Zika causes an array of birth abnormalities, from the shrunken heads and brain defects of microcephaly, to miscarriages and still births. Congress is locked in a battle over $1.1 billion in funding for Zika research, vaccine development and awareness campaigns.
In the meantime, the CDC has been working with state and territorial health departments to monitor pregnant women with any Zika exposure. There are two tracking systems, one for women in the continental U.S., and one for women in Puerto Rico. As of Friday, there were 157 infected U.S. women and 122 Puerto Rican women. Of the total 279 women, most are still pregnant, though less than 12 have had fetuses born with abnormalities or have had miscarriages, Honein said.
Neither Honein, nor Dr. Denise Jamieson, an ob/gyn and co-lead on the CDC’s pregnancy and birth defects Zika response team, would be specific about where the women lived or whether they elected to terminate their pregnancies once fetal birth defects were discovered. Researchers also couldn’t determine how many women got the virus by traveling to or living in a place with an active outbreak, or how many contracted the virus sexually through a male partner who got infected in one of the affected regions.
So far there have been no cases of local transmission of Zika on the U.S. mainland. The majority of cases, including the pregnant women, have been travel-related.
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