Public health experts are bracing for the appearance of the Zika virus – which causes severe birth defects among pregnant women who’ve been exposed to it – in the United States. However, they predict that it will not have the same devastating effect that it’s had in South America and the Caribbean.
“We have not yet seen local transmission of Zika in the continental U.S.,” said Dr. Tony Fauci, Director of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a CDC briefing last week. “By local transmission, we mean that a mosquito bites a person infected with Zika and that mosquito passes that infection on to another person through a mosquito bite. Zika is spread to people by the Aedes mosquito. They are common in parts of the United States, particularly southern states.”