babies exposed to the virus suffer from developmental delay

Transmitted by mosquitoes Aedes (like the tiger mosquito), the Zika virus can result in multiple complications. Instability, impaired walking, neurological disorders such as Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), and birth defects in babies of infected pregnant women. Fortunately, in reality, the majority of children born to a mother affected by Zika are born without microcephaly (poor growth of the skull). They suffer on the other hand from slight delays in development, reveals a new study published Monday January 6 in the American journal Jama Pediatrics.

In the department of Atlantico, in Colombia, a country very affected by Zika, American researchers followed 77 children exposed to the virus in utero, born in 2016 and 2017 until their 18 months. Among them, seven suffered from deformities. If the 70 others (91%) had apparently no problem, they were a few months behind on average on the major stages of development, this is what the researchers achieved thanks to a questionnaire of 50 questions, administered twice to parents between 4 and 18 months.

Scientists have noted delays in motor skills such as turning around, sitting down, crawling, walking and climbing stairs. Babies also suffer from social and cognitive delays such as waiting for their turn to throw a ball or playing “cuckoo”.

“Monitoring long-term neurological development” of exposed babies

“For most babies, the effect is not very big,” Sarah Mulkey, a pediatric neurologist at the Washington Children’s Hospital in the United States, who conducted the research, told AFP. “These are delays that you wouldn’t necessarily notice unless you did specific tests,” she said. It is recommended to monitor the long-term neurological development of all newborns exposed ”to the Zika virus in utero, conclude the researchers.

A few days ago, american scientists announced discovering that a higher dose of vaccine given to a pregnant mouse protected her and her fetus in Zika. A lower dose, however, was useless. No adverse effects were observed on pregnancy, fetal development and infant behavior. These results suggest that this vaccine could be useful even for people who are not pregnant. This study may change the way we think about treatments for Zika. Indeed, at present, everyone believes that the virus can neither be prevented (apart from avoiding mosquito bites), nor treated.

It is since 2015, when Zika caused an epidemic in Brazil, that the virus has become a public health issue. The epidemic then spread across South America, Central America and the Caribbean region before turning into a global pandemic. Recently, indigenous cases have been reported for the first time in the South East of France, in Hyères.