2016 is the year we learned how devastating Zika virus is and how it damages budding brains, how it feasts through sexual interaction and where (and the U.S.) it's hiding. But there has been one big question attached: What risk does Zika set to pregnant women wombs? How scared should they be of the virus? What are the chance a woman will still be healthy if she catches Zika during pregnancy?
In conclusion, scientists are beginning to solve it. And currently, it appears like good news. But when you dig a bit deeper into gathered date, the effects of Zika could be far more widespread than once predicted.
For the good news. Two studies issued earlier this month projected the risk that a baby will be born with microcephaly - a disorder that is characterized by a very small head and serious brain damage - after infected, during her first or second trimester of her gestation.
"Three percent is a small amount of microcephaly, it's certainly not as astrophysical as what had been projected." says Dr. Karin Nielsen, a pediatrician at the University of California, Los Angeles. And that small danger is likely why there haven't been as many microcephaly cases this year in Latin America and the Caribbean as officials had projected earlier this year.
So far, the only region reporting many microcephaly cases is the northeastern tip of Brazil, Nielsen says. Brazil has stated about 2,200 cases in total. And nearly 1,700 have happened in the northeast region, the Ministry of Health accounted.
Forthwith, no one is certain why the northeastern part of Brazil has been hit with most microcephaly cases. "What I personally believed materialized in this region is that the attack rate - meaning how many people got infected with Zika - was extremely high," Nielsen says.
And indeed, contagion with mosquito-borne virus, called chikungunya, can cause miscarriages and it low birth weights. But so far, there has been no evidence that this virus surges the risk of birth flaws, Nielsen says.
So, what's the bad news? Numerous studies have found that the effects of Zika on a developing fetus is way far beyond microcephaly. "There's been an immense focus on microcephaly," Nielsen says. "I think it's wrong to focus only on microcephaly because most studies have actually shown that microcephaly is not the most common outcome connected to Zika."
"We had offspring that had abnormal MRI while examining their brains, babies with eye anomalies, babies who failed hearing tests and giving the impression of a significant hearing loss," Nielsen says. "And we had babies also with fetal growth constraint" - a condition in which the fetus doesn't grow in the uterus. In some cases, if the mom was infected late, during the third-trimester pregnancy, her baby still had issues. In differences, with microcephaly, there appears to be a little bit of risk when the Zika virus occurs in late pregnancy.
When Nielsen and her team saw numerous babies with problems - more than 40 percent - they didn't believe at first. "We said, 'Wow that's high. But that's absurd,' " she says. "But then we looked at the data repeatedly and we said, 'No it's correct.' "
The learnings, were published in The New England Journal of Medicine, has a major restriction: The group had a high rate of problems in their infants as well. "Our control group was not wholly a control group," Nielsen says.
"We need to monitor these babies over time to see how they develop with the strain of Zika," Nielsen says. "Will they reach their milestones? Will they be able to walk or talk? Will they have problems at school? We just don't have adequate information yet."
