Zika's Dreadful Toll

"A child might be making those raspberry sounds, but they are not making even the sort of consonant sounds like 'mama, baba, data'."
"Children wouldn't turn to the sound of a rattle or they wouldn't be able to follow an object, which typically a child can do by six to eight weeks of age."
"What we suspect is that because they have experienced so much damage to the brain, that connection of an object being presented and being transmitted to the back of the brain is not happening, so that is a significant cognitive impairment."
Dr. Georgina Peacock, director, division of human development and disability, C.D.C. National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, Atlanta, GA, U.S.A.

Baby with microcephaly. Photo: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

"It's heartbreaking. We would expect that these children are going to require enormous amounts of work and require enormous amounts of care."
"These are the worst of our fears [that no amount of treatment will suffice to improve these children's development]."
Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in America

"It's very difficult to manage those children [Zika babies], because they need multiple types of specialists", explained Dr. Ernesto Marques, an infectious disease expert located at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Brazil, to begin with, has limited public health resources, and many of the parents of babies affected by the Zika virus are rural and poor. Vision therapy, glasses and Botox to relax rigid muscles appear promising interventions.

Most Zika babies have vision and hearing problems of a nature sufficiently serious as to interfere with their ability to learn and to develop normally. The first of those babies are now reaching two years of age with the more severely affected among them failing development indexes, an indication they will need special care throughout their lives. Confirmed by the results of a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in America.

Fifteen of the most disabled children born with disabilities inflicted by the Zika virus leaving them with abnormally small heads -- the condition of microcephaly -- were the subjects of that study. The infants, at 22 months, demonstrated the development expected in babies under six months of age. These severely affected infants were unable to sit  up, chew food, and had acquired no language skills.

Of the total of close to three thousand Zika babies born in Brazil, it is unclear how many will realize outcomes quite so severe as the study's children. Early indications are, however, that there may be hundreds of such babies. "Our results are similar to this study", affirmed Dr. Camila Ventura, head of clinical research at the Altino Ventura Foundation providing physical therapy, vision care and other services in Pernambuco state to its registry of 285 Zika babies.

The study had the cooperation of the Brazilian Ministry of Health and other interested organizations. Children from Paraiba state, the epicenter of the Zika crisis, were evaluated. Originally 278 babies born in Paraiba between October 2015 to the end of January 2016 were studied. For a follow-up evaluation, 122 families agreed to take part. In the end, eight girls and seven boys with a range of symptoms that had seen no improvement since infancy formed the kernel of the study.

All of these children had severely impaired motor skills, meeting the evaluative conditions for a cerebral palsy diagnosis, with one single exception. Most of these infants had seizures and problems sleeping. Among them, eight had been hospitalized, mostly for bronchitis or pneumonia, and nine experienced difficulties eating or swallowing, potentially lethal deficits that could see food stuck in the lungs, or of leaving the children malnourished.

Nearly 3,000 children were born with Zika-caused microcephaly in Brazil alone. Photo credit: EPA/Percio Campos