Montco reports first Zika case
Montgomery County on Tuesday announced its first case of Zika in what is likely to become a drumbeat of isolated infections as test results from Caribbean travelers are reported.
Montgomery County on Tuesday announced its first case of Zika in what is likely to become a drumbeat of isolated infections as test results from Caribbean travelers are reported.
Pennsylvania now has six reported cases, including one from Philadelphia announced last week. New Jersey has two. All of them, like all 153 cases in the continental United States, were identified in people who had been in areas of Latin America and the Caribbean where the virus is endemic.
An additional 108 cases have been reported in U.S. territories that are among the areas where the disease has been spread by a tropical mosquito. Most of those cases were acquired locally.
The Montgomery County case involves a 55-year-old woman who had traveled to one of the more than two dozen countries where Zika has been found. She was infected in February and experienced a couple of days of mild illness, said Valerie A. Arkoosh, a physician and Montgomery County commissioner who is interim medical director of the county health department.
The woman, a county resident who was not hospitalized, told her physician about the illness when she returned home and a test showed that she was positive, said Arkoosh, who said she believed that the woman had fully recovered. No other information was released.
Tests must be processed at a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which has a backlog of several weeks. The Pennsylvania Health Department alone has 211 blood samples awaiting testing.
Most Zika cases are transmitted by a mosquito species that does not live in temperate regions, although there have been a handful of reports of transmission through sex and blood transfusion.
Four out of five cases of Zika have no symptoms. But there is growing evidence that infection during pregnancy could lead to babies with small heads, known as microcephaly, which can be accompanied by other birth defects. The virus also may be linked to a form of temporary paralysis in adults known as Guillain-Barré syndrome.
"The Zika virus is generally a mild virus that lasts less than a week," Arkoosh said in a statement earlier.
"The CDC, the state health department, and our county health department are fully prepared for cases of Zika virus, which, it is important to note, cannot be transmitted through casual contact.
"We want to strongly encourage our residents to focus on mosquito-bite prevention if they travel to countries that are affected by the ongoing outbreak. It is also important to talk with your health-care provider about travel if you are pregnant or planning to become pregnant."
More information is posted at www.cdc.gov/zika.
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@DonSapatkin
