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VICTORIA – Two pregnant British Columbia women who have tested positive for the Zika virus face frightening days ahead, but most Canadians don’t need to worry about the virus transmitted by mosquitoes, health experts said Tuesday.
The pregnant women are among seven British Columbians with confirmed cases of Zika virus, which has been linked to birth defects.
Officials at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control and the provincial health office said the confirmed cases resulted from tests of 635 people who recently travelled to areas where the virus is spread by mosquitoes in South America, Latin America and the Caribbean.
?This number of seven people testing positive is just over one per cent of that number, so it indicates a pretty low level of exposure,? said Dr. David Patrick, an epidemiologist at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. Five of the seven confirmed cases are women, he said. The two pregnant women are being monitored regularly by their family doctors and are being checked by experts at the B.C. Women’s Hospital in Vancouver.
?At this point, nobody’s been hospitalized and we have not heard of any pregnancy complications associated with these women,? said Patrick. ?It’s the minority of Zika-affected pregnancies that end with an unfortunate outcome. We can be hopeful for these women.?
Zika virus in pregnancy is associated with microcephaly in newborns, a condition associated with an abnormally small head and brain.
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