Buzzfeed News | January 16, 2016
“I think the warning was appropriate and it’s balanced, given what we now know,” infectious disease expert Daniel Lucey of Georgetown University told BuzzFeed News. (This so-called level 2 alert is less serious than calls to totally avoid travel to a region, as was seen in the recent Ebola crisis in Western Africa.)
So far in Brazil, the Zika virus has infected perhaps 1.5 million people and has been linked to some 3,500 infants born with microcephaly, an abnormally small brain. That is a 20-fold increase in the birth defect there since 2014. “I would say the suspicions are very strong about the birth defect link at this point,” Lucey said.