The CDC recommended that pregnant women avoid traveling to Cuba, adding the country to a long list of countries and territories listed in earlier advisories. The CDC also cautioned other travelers to Cuba, which lies less than 100 miles south of Florida, to take precautions to prevent the spread of the virus, including protecting themselves from mosquito bites and using condoms or abstaining from sex. The virus can be sexually transmitted from a male partner.
[Lower risk for Zika at high altitudes, CDC says]
Some three dozen nations and territories in the Americas are grappling with local transmission of Zika, including the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Aruba. On March 8, the World Health Organization joined with the CDC in advising pregnant women to avoid areas where the Zika virus is actively spreading.
Though most people who are infected with Zika do not get sick or experience only mild symptoms, the virus is suspected in microcephaly, a serious birth defect in which children are born with undersize heads and underdeveloped brains, as well as Guillain-Barré, a rare neurological syndrome that can cause muscle weakness and paralysis. A study this month published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which examined a group of pregnant Brazilian women who tested positive for Zika infection, found that nearly one-third of the women had ultrasounds showing fetal anomalies with “grave outcomes.â€
[Mounting evidence points to Zika as culprit behind babies’ brain damage]
Scientists have not developed a vaccine or treatment for Zika.
Nearly all cases in the continental United States have been limited to infected travelers who brought the virus back home from Latin America or other regions. But based on the spread of previous outbreaks, the CDC estimates that 700,000 people in Puerto Rico – about one in five residents – could be infected by Zika virus by the end of this year.
Read more:
Why the rise in Zika cases in Puerto Rico raises risk for rest of U.S.
Zika outbreak: ‘The more we learn the worse things seem to get’
Zika has pregnant women worried and their doctors have few answers
Want to avoid Zika? Stay more than a mile above sea level, CDC says