Sugar Chemistry Is Helping Zika Virus Cross The Placenta stat : Forbes

Remember Zika virus? Just last Friday, the National Institutes of Health revealed it has commenced a clinical trial of an experimental Zika vaccine. The mosquito-borne Zika virus poses relatively few problems for adults. "We worked on the dengue virus 20 years ago," a virus in the same family as Zika, he says in a statement. Linhardt's team found out how a dengue virus protein called the envelope protein kicks off viral invasion: a positively-charged piece of the protein clamps tightly to negatively charged sugar chains on a host cell.




CDC Issues New Warning On Zika Virus Ahead Of Mosquito SeasonNPR's Robert Siegel talks to Margaret Honein, co-leader for the CDC Zika Response Team's Pregnancy and Birth Defects Task Force, about the latest guidance on Zika at the start of mosquito season. But as of today's update, there's over 1,700 pregnant women with Zika that have been reported to the U.S. Zika Pregnancy Registry. SIEGEL: That's Margaret Honein, head of the birth defects branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HONEIN: So there's been pregnant women reported from 44 different states in the U.S. Among those with confirmed infections in this report, about 10 percent had a baby that was identified with one of these serious birth defects.


Doctors in Puerto Rico are just beginning to assess the long-term consequences for children born to mothers with Zika. Epidemiologists expect to see fewer cases in Puerto Rico this year than last, but the disease is now endemic on the island. There are many people in Puerto Rico who don't take Zika seriously, and we should," she says. She's one of more than 1,000 babies already born in Puerto Rico to mothers with Zika. Many are being seen at the University of Puerto Rico by Dr. Carmen Zorrilla.


collected by :Lucy William

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