Pathfinder
Editor, Senior Moderator
Growing Support Among Experts for Zika Advice to Delay Pregnancy
Global Health
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. FEB. 5, 2016
...
This startling advice has been greeted in many quarters with a mixture of shock and derision. Medical historians said they had never heard the like. Advocates for women mocked it as unrealistic, disconnected from the difficult lives of women in a part of the world where contraception can be hard to obtain and abortion is often illegal.
Yet a growing number of infectious disease experts say that delaying pregnancy could work ? and may be the most effective way to break the back of this global epidemic.
Such a strategy would not stop the spread of mild illness that Zika causes in adults, or the surge in cases of Guillain-Barr? syndrome paralysis linked to those.
But waiting through at least one hot, wet, high-transmission season may save thousands of newborns from Zika?s terrifying suspected consequences: abnormally small heads and brain damage.
Dr. William Schaffner, the chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical School, even suggested that the Brazilian Army, which is set to go door to door next week looking for mosquito breeding spots and handing out pamphlets, ought to hand out condoms, too.
...
Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/health/zika-virus-women-pregnancy.html
Global Health
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. FEB. 5, 2016
...
This startling advice has been greeted in many quarters with a mixture of shock and derision. Medical historians said they had never heard the like. Advocates for women mocked it as unrealistic, disconnected from the difficult lives of women in a part of the world where contraception can be hard to obtain and abortion is often illegal.
Yet a growing number of infectious disease experts say that delaying pregnancy could work ? and may be the most effective way to break the back of this global epidemic.
Such a strategy would not stop the spread of mild illness that Zika causes in adults, or the surge in cases of Guillain-Barr? syndrome paralysis linked to those.
But waiting through at least one hot, wet, high-transmission season may save thousands of newborns from Zika?s terrifying suspected consequences: abnormally small heads and brain damage.
Dr. William Schaffner, the chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical School, even suggested that the Brazilian Army, which is set to go door to door next week looking for mosquito breeding spots and handing out pamphlets, ought to hand out condoms, too.
...
Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/health/zika-virus-women-pregnancy.html