JOAO PESSOA, Brazil (AP) – A 16-member team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention kicked off work Monday on a study to help determine whether the Zika virus really does cause babies to be born with the devastating birth defect microcephaly, as Brazilian researchers strongly suspect.
Brazil’s health minister has repeatedly said he’s sure that Zika is causing the birth defect but international health agencies say there is not enough evidence to be certain.
“We have very limited information and we want to get more,” Cynthia Moore, a microcephaly expert with the CDC, said at a training session in the capital of the northeastern state of Paraiba, one of the epicenters of Brazil’s tandem Zika and microcephaly outbreaks.
She said “evidence is mounting” for a causal link between Zika and microcephaly, but myriad questions remain about how the virus may affect fetuses, the magnitude of the risk of infection and whether other factors may in involved.
Eight teams from the CDC, the Health Ministry and the state health secretariat will search the state for babies with microcephaly and their mothers. They hope to recruit more than 100 mothers of babies with microcephaly and compare their blood work and other data with that of several hundred mother and babies without microcephaly born in the same areas around the same time.