Zika Virus Outbreak: Health Experts Perplexed Over Severity Defects of Microcephaly to Some Brazilian Babies

The Zika virus outbreak has raised concerns among pregnant parents and pain for mothers who delivered children with microcephaly. New reports suggest that even doctors are alarmed by its severity in some cases.

Sydney Morning Herald reported that consultations among doctors in Brazil and the United States have become more frequent in the last two weeks. Some of the leading authorities find patterns of unusual devastation in brain scans of the affected newborns.

"We are in the process of very rapid information gathering on what has been seen," said Dr. William Dobyns, a geneticist at Seattle Children's Hospital. "The condition that I've been able to review, very preliminarily, is more severe than simple microcephaly."

The Zika virus is transmitted by a mosquito that causes mild symptoms in about 20 percent of cases. Most people inflicted with it did not experience any illness.

The sudden increase of microcephaly cases in Latin America, where Zika outbreak was announced, triggered an international effort to determine if the virus causes the disease. The suspected association made the World Health Organization to declare an international health emergency on Monday.

Dobyns is skilled in researching and treating microcephaly and this prompted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and prevention to seek his expertise to help them understand the unfolding epidemic, Yahoo! News has learned.

Dobyns and a small group of geneticists and other microcephaly specialists reviewed the scans of babies, which were sent by a colleague in Brazil and they were surprised with the scale of malformations.

"These children have a very severe form of microcephaly," Dobyns said. "The brain is not just small, it's small with malformations of the cerebral cortex and calcifications. It has the appearance of a very severe, destructive injury to the brain."

Dobyns pointed out that, in Brazilian cases, the presence of excess spinal fluid between the brain and the skull of the babies is alarming because this suggests that the brain is actually shrinking.

Dr. Leonardo Vedolin, a neuroradiologist and researcher at the Moinhos de Vento hospital in Porto Alegre, Brazil shared two more scans of microcephalic babies with Dobyns. The health experts belong to a brain defects study groups that convene via video conference every month. Their focus now is on Zika virus.

Vedolin and the Brazil's Health Ministry were not able to provide a breakdown of the severity of the microcephaly cases in Brazil. However, according to Vedolin, 5 percent of microcephaly cases are severe but the proportion appears greater among the cases.

Dobyn added that the lifespan for severe cases could be months or as long as 10 years, depending on the proximity to good medical care.