WIKIMEDIA, CDCAt a meeting sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Intitules of Health’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, researchers and physicians gathered in Bethesda, Maryland, to discuss what we know—and don’t—about how congenital Zika virus infection can affect fetal development. As NICHD’s Catherine Spong said during her opening remarks, while there have been many different conferences on Zika, few have focused on children exposed to the virus in utero.
“The current information we have is limited,” Spong said. “We would anticipate based on what we know from other disease and infections that there will be spectrum of outcomes.” She added that, at this point, researchers and physicians must rely heavily on more well-understood infections. (Congenital CMV or rubella, for example, can manifest with Zika-like neurological outcomes, William Britt of the University of Alabama at Birmingham noted later in the morning.)
Carmen Zorrilla of the University of Puerto Rico and Vanessa Van der Linden of the Association for Assistance of Disabled Children in Recife, Brazil, both regularly treat Zika-affected babies. Their talks focused on some of the clinical cases that are contributing to growing datasets on the virus’s effects. Each week, Zorrilla gets new data ...
