Up to 270 Microcephaly Cases Expected in Puerto Rico Due to Zika


U.S. health experts estimate that as many as 270 babies in Puerto Rico may be born with microcephaly caused by Zika infections in their mothers during pregnancy.

The estimate is the first to project the potential impact of Zika on Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory located in the Caribbean that has borne the brunt of the outbreak in the United States. Puerto Rico had 10,690 laboratory-confirmed cases of Zika, including 1,035 pregnant women, as of Aug. 12.

Rising infection rates of the virus in Puerto Rico prompted the U.S. government to declare a state of public health emergency last week.

Using the most recent available data, researchers from the Puerto Rican Health Department and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention forecast that between 5,900 and 10,300 pregnant women in Puerto Rico will become infected with Zika during the initial outbreak, which began in Puerto Rico in December 2015.

“Based on the limited available information on the risk of microcephaly, we estimate between 100 to 270 cases of microcephaly might occur” between mid-2016 and mid-2017, said Dr. Margaret Honein, chief of the birth defects branch at the CDC, who was one of several authors of the study published August 19 in JAMA Pediatrics.

Honein said the findings do not paint the entire picture of Zika, which has also been linked to a number of other birth defects, including various brain abnormalities, limb joint deformities, club foot, deafness and eye abnormalities.

“It’s going to be very important to follow up on these infants,” she said.

Honein said the CDC was working closely with the Puerto Rican Department of Health to reduce the incidence or mitigate the impact of Zika infection, particularly in pregnant women.
“I think it’s critically important that we do everything we can to prevent Zika virus during pregnancy, and to minimize this very severe and devastating outcome.”

Honein said while the study was based on an imperfect understanding of Zika and its impact on unborn children, she said it was important to release the data to help the country plan for the services that will be needed to care for the children born with microcephaly.

The condition, in which infants are born with abnormally small heads for their age, is estimated to cost $10 million over the lifetime of one child.

The connection between Zika and microcephaly first came to light last fall in Brazil, which has now confirmed more than 1,800 cases of microcephaly that it considers to be related to Zika infection in the mothers.

World’s Largest Radio Telescope Faces a Troubling Future


The National Science Foundation is considering pulling its support from the famous Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico.

One of the world’s most iconic astronomy sites, Puerto Rico’s giant Arecibo Observatory, may be facing the end of its era. The National Science Foundation (NSF), the primary funder of Arecibo—which is the largest existing radio telescope and was featured in the movies Contactand GoldenEye, among others—is holding public meetings on June 7 to “evaluate potential environmental effects of proposed changes to operations at Arecibo Observatory,” according to an NSF announcement. Because those proposed changes include the option of shutting down the 305-meter dish telescope altogether, officials will likely get an earful about more than air quality and groundwater. Defenders of the observatory will have a chance to speak their minds at two meetings—at the San Juan DoubleTree Inn and the Puerto Rico Professional College of Engineers and Land Surveyors—and can submit comments in writing through June 23.

Since its completion in 1963 the storied telescope found fame for discoveries such as the first-ever planets outside the solar system in 1992 and the first indirect evidence of gravitational waves in 1974, a finding that earned its makers a Nobel Prize, among other landmark accomplishments. But the beloved observatory now stands on a precarious threshold. The NSF has to balance the operations of new and expensive facilities such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile against older ones like Arecibo while weighing federal scientific priorities and setting aside enough money for grants to individual scientists. With the NSF’s budget essentially flat since 2010, the agency cannot afford to run all its telescopes indefinitely, continue building new ones and still pay the country’s scientists. But researchers who use Arecibo argue that it has a useful life of novel discoveries ahead of it, even if is not as shiny as the newcomers, especially in some areas where it makes a unique contribution.

The observatory’s latest announcement follows recommendations made by two committees associated with the NSF, in 2012 and earlier 2016, reevaluating the agency’s role in running the telescope and “significantly decreasing funding.” This year the NSF also did a “feasibility study” to map out various futures for Arecibo and asked potential partners to propose ways they could take over some telescope operations. The NSF currently funds Arecibo at $8.2 million a year, two thirds of the telescope’s total cost, with NASA kicking in the last third to bankroll the observatory’s study of near-Earth asteroids. But two NSF divisions—Astronomical Sciences and Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences—which split their cost equally, are reconsidering their roles.

The “environmental impact statement,” for which the upcoming meetings seek public comment, will attempt to define the earthly effects of five different hypothetical scenarios, each involving a different financial commitment from the NSF. In one, everything would stay much the same. But the agency could also team up with “interested parties” who could help fund the telescope or other interested parties who want to run it as an educational facility.

More pessimistically, the NSF could mothball the site, shutting it down in such a way that it could restart (sometime in the future). Or it could dismantle the telescope altogether and restore the area to its natural state, as required by law if the agency fully divests itself of the observatory and closes it. Previous studies have said such a process could cost around $100 million—more than a decade’s worth of its current funding for telescope operations. Jim Ulvestad, director of the NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences, says the agency is still investigating, not concluding. “No alternative has been selected at this juncture,” he says. And much consideration will go into the final financial decision, whatever it may be. Some outside the agency see writing on the wall. “NSF is dead serious about offloading Arecibo funding to someone else—anyone else,” says Ellen Howell, a former staff scientist at Arecibo and now a faculty member at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) in Tucson, Arizona.

This is hardly the first time Arecibo’s future has felt precarious. A quick Google search will net you various “Save Arecibo!” campaigns from the 2007 era—for instance, after an NSF-commissioned report recommended decreasing the agency’s funding for the telescope from 2007’s $10.5 million to $4 million in 2011. Its current $8.2 million-a-year allowance is a compromise. And the observatory has company in its current crisis. The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Very Long Baseline Array spread across the country, and several older telescopes on Kitt Peak in Arizona are wading through similar budgetary muck, trying to work out new private partnerships (with NSF assistance) after the agency decided to cut their cords. And according to documents and e-mails obtained byThe Sydney Morning Herald, the Parkes radio telescope in Australia is facing similar funding shortfalls. A “likely recommendation,” according toThe Herald, will be that Parkes and another Australian facility “raise external funds by charging for access to the telescope facilities.” Green Bank, Arecibo and Parkes are three of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes—historically open to scientists who successfully submit proposals to use them—and government-based financial problems may lead them all into eventual closure or into the arms of private interests, where whoever pays gets to choose what type of science is done.

Arecibo currently is used for radio astronomy, space and atmospheric science as well as radar studies of comets, asteroids and planets. These areas are brimming with potential for the observatory to make many exciting discoveries in the future, advocates say. Xavier Siemens, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, is especially excited about the possibility for using Arecibo to detect gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—coming from supermassive black holes. Because it is the largest and most sensitive single-dish radio telescope in the world, Arecibo is one of the best instruments available for detecting pulsars, the fast-spinning remnants of dead, once-huge stars. Scientists like Siemens currently use Arecibo and the also-threatened Green Bank Telescope to find and monitor a network of pulsars they hope will help detect gravitational waves.

Without Arecibo, he says, that search would be crippled. Although the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which announced the first detection of gravitational waves in February to much fanfare, will continue running, it catches different waves than pulsar studies such as Arecibo’s do. “What’s really amazing to me is that in the wake of the discovery of gravitational waves, NSF is going to shut down the world’s most sensitive radio telescope and hinder the detection—the opening of the only other gravitational-wave window that we can open in the next few years,” he says. “It’s surreal.”

It may be surreal but Howell believes it is also realistic. “I am afraid that NSF has already made up its collective mind to reduce their support to much less than the current $8 million per year or so to perhaps nothing,” Howell says. “I think this is an embarrassment after so many years of scientific achievements when so little could continue the productivity.”

Michael Nolan, now at the LPL, worked at Arecibo for 20 years and was director from 2008 to 2011. He claims the observatory used to have better friends in high places, specifically in the NSF’s Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences division. “The two main advocates are now retired, and it seems like that voice is, too,” he says. “The Astronomy division has seemed like managers rather than advocates for a long time, though, of course, I’m not privy to their internal discussions.”

And whereas the NSF’s deliberations have not yet resulted in a decision to back away from the observatory completely or at all, the delay of what may be inevitable is not doing the telescope any favors, Nolan argues. Arecibo’s leaders cannot ask new potential donors to make up for a specific shortfall because they do not know if or by how much the NSF might curb its aid. Recalling his tenure at Arecibo, and the regular jeopardy it was in even back then, Nolan wishes the facility did not have to be so often rescued from the brink: “You know that line in The Incredibles?” he asks. “‘Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, you know? For a little bit.’”

In addition to its scientific import, Arecibo also plays a concrete, down-to-earth role in the community. An economy exists around the rural facility, which provides jobs to local residents and infuses the area with cash-dispensing visitors—both touristic and scientific. The environmental statement will also evaluate those human impacts. If the NSF does decide to tighten the purse strings and no other organization steps up to fill the gap, the consequences will ripple across science and society, space and time. “If Arecibo has to close because NSF has other priorities, it will not be possible to bring it back anytime soon, when or if we come to our senses,” the LPL’s Howell says. She and many scientists would agree that an empty Arecibo site would be—as Jodie Foster says in Contact—an “awful waste of space.”

Officials Report First Zika Death in Puerto Rico


The first known Zika virus-linked death in Puerto Rico was announced Friday by officials of the U.S. territory.

A 70-year-old man with Zika died in February from severe thrombocytopenia, which causes a low blood platelet count that can lead to internal bleeding. The death was announced by Puerto Rico’s health secretary, Ana Rius.

So far, Puerto Rico has had more than 600 Zika cases, including 73 involving pregnant women. All 14 women who have given birth so far have had healthy babies, the Associated Pressreported. Zika can cause severe birth defects.

Sixteen of the Zika patients in Puerto Rico have been hospitalized and four are believed to have developed temporary paralysis due to the mosquito-borne virus, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC is urging all residents of and travelers to Puerto Rico to continue to protect themselves from mosquito bites, take precautions to reduce the risk of sexual transmission of the virus, and seek medical care for any acute illness with rash or fever.

While the Zika virus poses little health risk to most people, it poses a significant threat to pregnant women because it can cause a birth defect called microcephaly, which results in babies born with abnormally small heads and brains.

To control the threat posed by Zika, officials in Puerto Rico are pursuing “vector control activities” that include indoor and outdoor spraying of insecticides and reducing mosquito breeding grounds, especially around pregnant women’s homes, the CDC said.

As of April 27, there were 1,025 confirmed cases of Zika in U.S. states and territories, according to the CDC. Nearly all of these infections were acquired by people who had traveled outside the United States.

As mosquito season approaches, U.S. health experts expect to see more infections in Gulf Coast states such as Florida and Texas, as well as Hawaii.

Meanwhile, new research suggests the Zika virus was circulating in Haiti months before the first cases in Brazil — the epicenter of the outbreak — were reported last spring.

“We know that the virus was present in Haiti in December of 2014,” said Dr. Glenn Morris, director of University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute. “And, based on molecular studies, it may have been present in Haiti even before that date.”

What remains unclear is exactly why there was such a widespread outbreak in Brazil, the study authors said, and more research is needed to reveal why the same did not happen in Haiti.

In Brazil, Zika infections have been linked to more than 5,000 cases of the birth defect microcephaly.

To uncover Zika’s presence in Haiti, the team of researchers analyzed three “mystery” infections reported in that country in 2014.

The cases involved school-aged children in Haiti’s Gressier/Leogane region who developed a fever. The students were taken to a free clinic where samples of their blood were screened for dengue, chikungunya and malaria.

The blood tests ruled out these three well-known viruses but little thought was given to the Zika virus, which was not known to be present in the region at the time.

Using an advanced testing method, the University of Florida researchers went back and analyzed the children’s blood samples. They found the samples tested positive for the Zika virus.

Their findings, published April 26 in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, suggest the virus was circulating in the Americas long before it swept through Brazil.

The earliest known outbreak of the Zika virus occurred in 2007 in a small group of islands in French Polynesia, known as the Yap Islands. That outbreak affected an estimated 73 percent of people aged 3 and older, the researchers said.

After comparing the viruses, the researchers found the genetic sequences of the slightly older Haitian strains of the virus were more similar to the French Polynesian strains than many of the Brazilian strains.

“There is a possibility that this virus had been moving around the Caribbean before it hit the right combination of conditions in Brazil and took off,” Morris said in a university news release.

“By using the sophisticated culturing and sequencing capabilities that we have here at the Emerging Pathogens Institute, we were able to begin to fill in some of the unknown areas in the history of the Zika virus, leading us toward a better understanding of what caused this outbreak to suddenly occur at the magnitude that it did in Brazil,” Morris said.

First U.S. Zika-Related Death Reported In Puerto Rico.


STILL NO VACCINE TO COMBAT THE OUTBREAK

zika

Aedes aegypti mosquito

The species of mosquito responsible for the transmitting the Zika virus.

Today, Puerto Rico’s health secretary, Ana Rius, confirmed that the U.S. territory has had its first recorded death relating to the Zika virus.According to the Associated Press, Rius said a 70-year-old man who was infected with the virus died in February. His death was directly caused by a drop in blood platelets, a condition known as thrombocytopenia, that can cause internal bleeding.

 This death is the first reported within the U.S. to be related to the Zika virus. Also as of today, the CDC reported that there were 683 cases of Zika in Puerto Rico from November 1st to April 15th.

While death from Zika is rare, other related conditions, including the recently confirmed link between the virus and the developmental condition, microcephaly and the neurological condition Guillain-Barre, are of increasing concern. There is currently no vaccine or treatment to combat the virus.

 

First case of chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus, acquired in U.S.


A Florida man has chikungunya, a painful but rarely deadly disease that has caused outbreaks in Africa, Asia and Europe. He is the first person in the continental United States to contract the virus without traveling outside the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionsaid Thursday.

The case represents the first time that mosquitoes on the U.S. mainland have passed the virus to a person. More than 200 cases have been reported in the United States this year, all previously in people who had traveled to other countries.

Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have also reported locally acquired cases of chikungunya. The first cases acquired locally in the Western Hemisphere date to December 2013.

The two species of mosquito that carry the virus, Aedes aegypti and A. albopictus, live in a broad swath of the United States.

Chikungunya causes fever, headache and joint pain that can be debilitating. No treatments or vaccines are available.