Zika virus: Pregnant women describe a 'nightmarish' situation as US politicians continue to stall on funding

For almost a week Christina Frigo has barely left her house in Miami.

She lives not far from Wynwood, where the first cases of locally transmitted Zika were found late last month — and she is also 32 weeks pregnant.

"I've been in the Wynwood area many times [and] my husband works there; we live very close to there and I get bitten by mosquitoes a lot no matter how much spray I'm wearing," she says.

"No matter how much I'm covered up I seem to be attractive to them. So yeah, I'm nervous."

For most people the mosquito-born virus is harmless, but for pregnant women it can cause devastating birth defects in their babies.

Sitting in her lounge room, Ms Frigo is waiting for her doctor to call and tell her if the test she took earlier this week has shown positive for Zika.

Too early' to say what impact will be on pregnant women

Doctors in the United States are monitoring more than 500 pregnant women who have contracted Zika while overseas in recent months.

"Of those, we are already starting to see the beginnings of either births that has a baby with an abnormality or a pregnancy that was terminated spontaneously or otherwise," Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says.

"With regard to cases that are domestic cases, that we say are locally transmitted, it is too early to say what the impact will be on any pregnant women."

Health authorities have issued an unprecedented health warning for pregnant women to stay away from a 2.5 square kilometre area in Wynwood, where the locally transmitted cases have been detected.

County inspectors are going house-to-house in search of the aedes aegypti mosquito that can carry the virus.

The species is present in 30 states in the US and is notoriously hard to kill.

"All it takes is a container and a little bit of water and they will breed in that and that makes them very hard to find and very hard to combat," Frank Calderon, from the Miami-Dade County department that overseas mosquito control, said.

But at the moment a lack of funding is one of the biggest challenges to combating the spread of the virus.

Congress is refusing to approve a request President Barack Obama made in February for $1.9 billion to tackle the virus.

It would go towards many things including mosquito control, vaccine trials and studies to learn more about how the virus affects unborn babies.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-15/zika-virus-in-miami-women-describe-a-'nightmarish'-situation/7731648