Author: Aimee Cunningham / Source: Science News
Babies exposed to a Zika infection while in the womb are not out of the woods even if they look healthy at birth.
Nearly 1 in 10 of 1,450 babies examined developed neurological or developmental problems, such as seizures, hearing loss, impaired vision or difficulty crawling, a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds. It’s the first tally of the health of children at least 1 year old who were born in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories and exposed to Zika in utero.
Overall, 14 percent of children exposed to Zika in the womb — about 1 in 7 — were harmed in some way by the virus, the researchers report online August 7 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. These babies were either born with a birth defect such as microcephaly — a condition in which a baby’s head is significantly smaller than it should be — or developed neurological symptoms that may be related to Zika, or both.
“Congenital Zika virus infection is quite serious, even beyond just the microcephaly,” says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who was not…
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