In Switzerland, the Vaudois University Hospital Center (CHUV) is launching a register to count the number of women exposed to the Zika virus around the world.
First case of microcephaly in Canada, state of health emergency in Puerto Rico, the Zika virus never ceases to be talked about. Transmitted by a mosquito of the genus Aedes, it threatens women during pregnancy, and their spouses, also transmitters of the disease.
In order to better understand the risk to the health of future babies, Swiss doctors have launched an international registry aimed at identifying pregnant women exposed to the Zika virus.
It’s in the latest edition of the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases that Dr David Baud, obstetrician-gynecologist at the Vaud University Hospital Center (CHUV, Lausanne) and his colleagues, justify this approach. They would have contacted more than 4,000 obstetricians around the world to participate in this register.
Estimate the risk for the child
According to the Swiss press, these scientists hope that this census will reduce the uncertainties about the level of risk to the unborn child when the virus is contracted during pregnancy, whether or not the woman has shown symptoms of infection. (fever, muscle or joint pain, conjunctivitis …).
The authors add that “the extent of fetal and neonatal abnormalities remains unclear” and is not limited to microcephaly. They point out, among other things, “late complications” that babies born without symptoms could later develop, such as, for example, “hearing and visual deficits”.
At present, the Institut Pasteur estimates that, during an infection occurring in the first trimester of pregnancy, the risk of microcephaly (malformation with insufficient development of the skull and brain) is 1%. A figure they obtained retrospectively after the epidemic in French Polynesia which raged between October 2013 and March 2014, they specify.
Other modes of transmission under study
But these figures vary depending on the area concerned. Microcephaly, for example, has been suspected in 2% of newborns in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, regardless of the date of maternal exposure. And more recently in Rio de Janeiro, where the epidemic began in mid-2015, fetal abnormalities were reported in 29% of women who showed signs of Zika infection.
Finally, for the CHUV doctors, it is advisable to check whether the virus, transmitted mainly by mosquitoes, but also by sexual route, does not also risk being transmitted by saliva or breastfeeding.
As a reminder, the Zika virus has been detected in breast milk, but there is no evidence to date that the virus is transmitted to children by breastfeeding “, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
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