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Today’s culture could accurately be called “confessional.” People share tell-all blog posts and videos spilling intimate details of their lives, opening up their innermost thoughts to the entire world. And while in some ways, this can be helpful or laudatory, in other ways, it’s deeply troubling. An example of why it’s troubling is the trend of special needs parents opening up about how they wish their child with a disability never existed. Some of them file lawsuits for “wrongful birth,” blaming doctors for not diagnosing their child with a disability prenatally so the parents could have had an abortion. Others...

Brazil's microcephaly epidemic continues to pose a mystery -- if Zika is the culprit, why are there no similar epidemics in other countries also hit hard by the virus? In Brazil, the microcephaly rate soared with more than 1,500 confirmed cases. But in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases? Perhaps there is another reason for the epidemic in Brazil. According to a new report by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), the number of missing cases in...

Just looking like so many repeats of the past, how the hell does the zika virus just show up in Miami?

As many as 1.65 million women in Latin America could be infected with Zika while pregnant, meaning tens of thousands of pregnancies could be at risk, researchers said Monday. It's the first real estimate of just how many actual pregnancies are at real risk, based on birth rates in each country and other factors. Brazil's likely to be the worst affected, the team at the University of Notre Dame and Britain's University of Southampton found. The team calculated the subset of women who get pregnant every year and who go on to have a baby -- many pregnancies end in...

Brazil's microcephaly epidemic continues to pose a mystery...if Zika is the culprit, why are there no similar epidemics in other countries also hit hard by the virus? In Brazil, the microcephaly rate soared with more than 1,500 confirmed cases. But in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases? Perhaps there is another reason for the epidemic in Brazil. According to a new report by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), the number of missing cases in Colombia and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that it is monitoring 320 U.S. pregnant women with laboratory evidence of Zika virus infection, up from 287 women a week earlier. However, the number of babies born in the United States with birth defects linked to Zika infection in mothers during pregnancy, or lost pregnancies linked to the virus, remained unchanged from last week's report at 7 and 5, respectively, according to a CDC registry created last month. The registry compiles poor outcomes of pregnancies with laboratory evidence of possible Zika virus infection in the...

<p>Doctors at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey confirmed Tuesday the birth of a child suffering from Zika-linked microcephaly, a condition wherein the child's brain and head are partially developed.</p> <p>The mother, who is 31 but whose name was not disclosed, contracted the Zika virus while in Honduras and was admitted to the emergency room at Hackensack on Friday while vacationing in the United States. Tuesday, doctors delivered her baby girl, who was born also with intestinal and visual issues. Reports indicate she is the first child born with Zika-linked complications in the New York tri-state area.</p>

Zika virus (ZIKV) is an arbovirus belonging to the genus Flavivirus (family Flaviviridae) and was first described in 1947 in Uganda following blood analyses of sentinel Rhesus monkeys1. Until the twentieth century, the African and Asian lineages of the virus did not cause meaningful infections in humans. However, in 2007, vectored by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, ZIKV caused the first noteworthy epidemic on the Yap Island in Micronesia2. Patients experienced fever, skin rash, arthralgia and conjunctivitis2. From 2013 to 2015, the Asian lineage of the virus caused further massive outbreaks in New Caledonia and French Polynesia. In 2013, ZIKV reached Brazil,...

One of the world's leading virologists has warned against public hysteria surrounding the Zika virus, saying global health authorities need to focus more broadly on prevention of infectious diseases rather than finding a cure for specific outbreaks. Leslie Lobel, an Israeli physician who has worked with the US military and the Uganda Virus Research Institute to try to find a vaccine for Ebola, believes ...the evidence is not yet conclusive. "it's not clear that what's going on in Brazil is linked to the Zika virus. There's no definitive proof that Zika is causing microcephaly. I believe the hysteria is way...

Why Is the Zika Outbreak Being Used to Legalize Abortion in Brazil? By Julio Severo In recent months, because of the Zika virus, which has had a strange connection with microcephaly in unborn babies of pregnant women in several Brazilian regions, many leftist groups, including the World Health Organization, are calling for the legalization of abortion in Brazil, the world's most populous Catholic country. But push for abortion legalization is creating a backlash, particularly among the families of disabled children. Many have taken to social media apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, where more than half of Brazil's 200 million...

Large numbers of babies with borderline normal head sizes were born in Brazil as far back as 2012, two years before the Zika virus is thought to have entered the country, say researchers searching for answers to urgent questions. Pediatric cardiologist Dr. Sandra Mattos had been collecting data on 100,000 newborns in the Brazilian state of Paraiba as part of her work studying and treating congenital heart disease. The microcephaly fears linked to the Zika virus drove her team to check back into hospital records for head circumferences of more than 1,600 babies born in the state in the last...

SAO PAULO, Brazil - A little-known virus spread by mosquitoes is causing one of the most alarming health crises to hit Brazil in decades, officials here warn: thousands of cases of brain damage, in which babies are born with unusually small heads. ...The alarm stems from a huge surge in babies with microcephaly, a rare, incurable condition in which their heads are abnormally small. Brazilian officials have registered at least 2,782 cases this year, compared with just 147 in 2014 and 167 the year before. ...No one knows precisely when the Zika virus made the leap to Brazil from its...

Taking sides in the battle of the 'hobbit' 05:00 09 October 2006 Jeff Hecht The battle among paleaoanthropologists over Homo Floresiensis, popularly known as "the hobbit", threatens to become an epic of Lord of the Rings proportions. The debate rages on over whether the fossil, found on the Indonesian island of Flores, is a separate species or simply a modern human with stunted development. Now Robert Martin at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, US, claims the controversial fossil, discovered in 2004 was really a Stone Age Homo sapiens (modern human) with a mild form of the condition...

Ira Block/National GeographicSome scientists say this skull, smaller than those of modern humans, is from a newfound species. Not all scientists agree that the 18,000-year-old "little people" fossils found on the Indonesian island of Flores should be designated an extinct human-related species. Some expressed their opposition in news interviews and informal symposiums, but papers arguing their case were rejected by major journals. snip... In today's issue of the journal Science, researchers led by Robert D. Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago present evidence they say supports their main argument, that the skull in question is not that of...