Colombia
confirms first three deaths of patients infected with Zika virus
Patients
had contracted a seemingly related disease that attacks the nervous
system and causes paralysis, and another two deaths were still
unconfirmed
Sibylla Brodzinsky
in Bogotá
Thursday 4 February
2016 22.12 GMT
Colombia has
confirmed the first three deaths of patients infected with the Zika
virus who had contracted a seemingly related disease that attacks the
nervous system and causes paralysis.
Alejandro Gaviria,
the health minister, told the Guardian that another two deaths caused
by the disease – known as Guillain-Barré syndrome – were still
unconfirmed to be Zika-related.
Health officials in
the country’s second city, Medellín, reported on Thursday that a
man and a woman admitted from other areas died in the past week after
presenting symptoms of Guillain-Barré, which include muscle weakness
and paralysis. Another man died in late November. All three tested
positive for the Zika virus.
Gaviria said
Colombia has registered about 100 cases of GBS that are believed to
be related to the Zika virus. Overall, Colombia has recorded more
than 20,500 confirmed cases of Zika infection.
Guillain-Barré-related
deaths are rare but Gaviria warned that recent cases of the disorder
seen in Colombia have not responded to traditional treatments of
immunoglobulin.
“Mortality is
high,” Gaviria said in a phone interview a day after meeting with
health ministers from around Latin America in Montevideo to address
the crisis caused by the spread of Zika.
Zika virus by itself
causes mild flu-like symptoms or no symptoms at all, but earlier this
week the World Health Organization declared an international public
health emergency because of suspected links to a birth defect known
as microcephly, which causes babies to be born with abnormally small
heads.
Reported
microcepahly cases spiked in Brazil which has the world’s highest
number of people infected with Zika.
But Gaviria said
that in Colombia, which has the second highest Zika patients, no
cases of related microcephaly have been reported. “It’s sort of a
mystery,” he said adding that either Colombia will start seeing
microcephaly cases soon, or there are factors in Brazil that
predispose patients to it that do not exist in Colombia.
The science journal
Nature reported that researchers of birth defects in Latin America
were questioning the real size of the apparent surge in the number of
microcephaly in Brazilian children.
But Jorge
Lopez-Camelo and Ieda Maria Orioli, from the Latin American
Collaborative Study of Congenital Malformations (ECLAMC), suggested
that the baseline may have been underestimated and that heightened
awareness of the birth defect, because of the possible link with
Zika, may have led to an increase in reported cases.
“We are only now
beginning to understand the dimensions of Zika,” Gaviria said.
Colombia has said
that if microcephaly is detected in foetuses, women can opt to abort.
Under Colombian law, abortion is legal for women whose foetuses show
a malformation that makes life unviable, if the pregnancy was a
result of rape, or if the woman’s health is in danger.
Gaviria has argued
that includes women’s mental health, which could be cited in the
case of giving birth to a child with microcephly.
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