CHICAGO – As many as 1.65 million women of childbearing age in Central and Latin America are at risk of being infected with Zika, resulting in tens of thousands of pregnancies that could be affected by the mosquito-borne virus that is linked with severe birth defects.
The projections, published on Monday in Nature Microbiology, are based on an enhanced model of the Zika outbreak.
Prior modelling efforts that focus on the number of cases have been challenging because people infected with Zika often don’t have symptoms.
The new research takes into account prior outbreaks of similar viruses, mosquito transmission patterns, climate conditions, virus incubation periods, and the impact of herd immunity — which occurs when a high percentage of a population becomes immune to an infection.
Herd immunity can extinguish an outbreak when so many people become immune — either naturally or through vaccination — that the virus no longer spreads efficiently.
