DM Monitoring
NEW DELHI: Authorities in India’s southern Kerala state have issued a statewide alert after a case of the Zika virus was confirmed, officials said.
A further 13 suspected cases were being investigated, state’s Health Minister Veena George said on Friday.
A 24-year-old pregnant woman was found to be infected with the mosquito-borne disease and was undergoing treatment at a hospital in Thiruvananthapuram city.
Samples from the 13 suspected cases have been sent for further investigation to a lab in Pune, the Kerala minister added.
Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable and can transmit the infection to their newborns which can result in life-altering conditions such as Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare auto-immune disease. It can also cause birth defects such as microcephaly, which causes babies to be born with a smaller head due to abnormalities in brain development.
Zika is mostly spread through the bite of the Aedes mosquito but can also be sexually transmitted, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus was first discovered in monkeys in Uganda’s Zika Forest in 1947 and has caused several outbreaks across the world in recent decades.
