You’ll see headlines from misleading sites saying that the number of Zika virus infected women in America has tripled from 50 to 105. That’s not true. The government is lowering the bar on how they count the infections, resulting in what appears to be three times as many.
Still, that’s no bueno.
Here’s more from WSBTV:
The number of pregnant women in the United States infected with Zika virus is suddenly tripling, due to a change in how the government is reporting cases.
Previously, officials had reported how many pregnant women had both Zika symptoms and positive blood tests. In a change announced Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s count will include all women who tested positive, regardless of symptoms.
There are now 157 pregnant women infected with Zika in the 50 states, up from the 48 reported last week under the old definition.
Experts emphasized that there does not appear to be any dramatic actual increase of pregnant women with the disease in recent months. There was a spike in diagnoses in February and March, but relatively few new cases since then, according to CDC data that includes women who experienced symptoms and those who didn’t.
The Zika virus causes only a mild and brief illness, at worst, in most people. But in the last year, infections in pregnant women have been strongly linked to fetal deaths and to potentially devastating birth defects, mostly in Brazil.
The virus is spread mainly through the bite of a tropical mosquito called Aedes aegypti. It can be found in the southern United States, but there’s no evidence that they’ve been spreading the virus in the U.S. yet. All the 544 total cases in the 50 states so far have been people who had traveled to outbreak areas, or who had sex with someone who did.
It could be that the government started doing this in order to compel Congress to push Obama’s spending bill on treating Zika in the Americas.
Here’s more on that:
This might be unpopular but I don’t mind us spending money to help solve the Zika crisis in South America. There’s a good chance that the epidemic will reach farther into America, and the best way to prevent that is to fight it where it’s worst, just like we did with Ebola.