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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has responded to growing alarm over the Zika virus epidemic in Central and South America with quickly published guidelines covering health care and tests for pregnant women who may have been exposed to the virus.
The guidelines come on the heels of the CDC’s recommendation last Friday night that US women who are pregnant, or planning to become pregnant, avoid traveling to the 13 countries where transmission of Zika has occurred, and also to the US territory of Puerto Rico.
Zika, which is transmitted by mosquitoes, arrived in South America in 2014 and ignited a pandemic. Most of the adult cases, which number more than 1 million, have been mild. (It is generally accepted that four out of five people infected with Zika do not develop symptoms; so the true number of those infected is likely more than 5 million.) But in Brazil, there has been an epidemic of a birth defect called microcephaly—smaller than usual brains and heads in newborns— that is associated temporally, and by...
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