Athletes have already expressed concern about traveling to the heart of the Zika outbreak to compete in this summer’s Olympics. Now journalists are opting out entirely. Several NBC employees will not travel to Brazil to cover the games, including Today anchor Savannah Guthrie, who announced today that she’s pregnant. The CDC made a recommendation in February that women who are pregnant should not travel to Zika-affected countries, then later expanded the recommendation to include women who are considering getting pregnant.

Florida health officials confirmed 10 new Zika infections on Friday, the largest number of infections found on a single day and a sign of the United States’ faltering response to a looming crisis. There are now nearly 1,000 people infected with the virus in Washington DC and the 50 states, 246 of them in Florida, and 2,026 infections in American territories, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Those totals include 537 pregnant women, 43 of whom live in Florida. The state has also seen its first case of an infant born with microcephaly, the fifth case of the birth defect related to the virus in the US.

New York City's health department on Friday reported the first female-to-male transmission of the Zika virus, which is most typically spread by the bite of an infected mosquito. Transmission of the virus occurred on the day that a woman in her 20s returned to New York from an area with active Zika transmission and had a single event of unprotected sex with a male partner. The man had not traveled outside of the United States in the prior year.

The Zika virus is rapidly spreading though Puerto Rico, leading to more than 5,500 infections, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported today. Puerto Rico has been dealing with the Zika outbreak for months, and Zika infections have spiked recently, rising from 14 percent testing positive among those tested in February to 64 percent in June, the CDC reported. Officials are calling the situation in Puerto Rico "a Zika epidemic."

The Zika virus has been found in the sperm of an Italian man six months after his first symptoms, twice as long as in previously reported cases. Doctors at the Spallanzani Institute for Infectious Diseases in Rome said it pointed to the possibility that the virus was reproducing itself in the male genital tract. The infection is suspected of leading to thousands of babies being born with underdeveloped brains. Zika is spread by mosquitos.

The Florida Keys are three months away from a straw poll vote on whether to release millions of genetically modified mosquitoes on an island just east of Key West, and the tourist destination is awash in lawn signs. Alongside the typical signs to vote for court clerk, judge, sheriff or school board are signs that showcase the overhead view of a mosquito and read: “NO CONSENT to release of genetically modified mosquitoes”. For the last five years, the biotechnology company Oxitec has been developing a plan to experimentally...

Scientists have discovered three existing drugs - used for cancer, hepatitis C and for parasitic infections - that they say appear promising against the Zika virus. The experiments were conducted only in lab-grown human cells in petri dishes, but the results were dramatic. Zika is so devastating that the damage it does has been thought to be irreversible. But the researchers said some of the compounds that the group tested not only allowed cells to live longer in the face of infection - but also in some cases fully recover from them.

On Sunday morning, the South Carolina honey bees began to die in massive numbers. Death came suddenly to Dorchester County, S.C. Stressed insects tried to flee their nests, only to surrender in little clumps at hive entrances. The dead worker bees littering the farms suggested that colony collapse disorder was not the culprit — in that odd phenomenon, workers vanish as though raptured, leaving a living queen and young bees behind.

When officials in Dorchester County, South Carolina, planned a weekend aerial spraying of pesticide, they were hoping to kill mosquitoes that might be carrying viruses like Zika. The pesticide probably exterminated plenty of the summertime nuisances, infected or not. But the spraying also left millions of honeybees dead because a government employee failed to notify a commercial beekeeper of the spraying schedule, according to the county administrator.

‘It kills everything’: conservationist warns over threat to other animals but regulators say ‘clear and public health crisis’ allows use of Naled chemical. Huddled around their hives, beekeepers around the south-eastern US fear a new threat to their livelihood: a fine mist beaded with neurotoxin, sprayed from the sky by officials at war with mosquitos that carry the Zika virus.

The deal to fight the mosquito-borne virus came after lawmakers dropped a controversial provision to block payments to Planned Parenthood for women's health care.

One year after the W.H.O. declared a public health emergency, experts reflect on the response to the virus and find many aspects wanting. By Donald G. McNeil Jr.

The Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech’s ‘killed Zika virus vaccine’ using an African strain has shown 100% efficacy against mortality and disease in animal studies, a study has shown. A ‘killed virus vaccine’ or ‘inactivated vaccine’ contains virus that has been grown in culture and then killed using physical or chemical processes.

Travelers infected with the Zika virus in the Caribbean brought it to South Florida multiple times before officials realized it had reached the U.S., an analysis of virus genomes finds. By Greg Allen.

Queensland researchers have found a way to kill the Zika virus using compounds found in an Australian native plant. The compounds halt the virus, which causes birth defects, and stop it replicating without damage to host mammalian cells, QUT scientists say.

There are currently no licensed vaccines or therapeutics available to combat Zika, although a $100m clinical trial is underway.

Zika virus can infect and kill brain stem cells, causing neurological problems and microcephaly in babies. But this trait may also fight deadly glioblastoma

Two people who live in Williamson County tested positive for Zika this month, making it the first Zika cases in Texas this year. The Texas Department of State Health Services says the two cases were travel-related and the two individuals got sick while abroad. The peak of the Zika scare was in 2016, when it became a nationally notifiable condition. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5,168 Zika virus cases were reported in 2016. That year, Texas had 312 cases of the Zika virus and six of those cases happened from local mosquitos.

Never afraid to try and turn a pathogen into a potential tool for treating other diseases, scientists have uncovered a therapeutic use for the Zika virus (ZIKV). Investigators at the University of São Paulo's Bioscience Institute (IB-USP) in Brazil have just published new data showing that ZIKV can be used in vivo to treat aggressive human central nervous system (CNS) tumors. Findings from the new study were published recently in Cancer Research, in an article entitled “Zika Virus Selectively Kills Aggressive Human Embryonal CNS Tumor Cells In Vitro and In Vivo.”

Nearly one in seven babies born to women infected with the Zika virus while pregnant had one or more health problems possibly caused by the virus, according to a Vital Signs report published Tuesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The problems consisted of birth defects including small head size, brain damage, eye damage and nervous system problems, such as vision and hearing impairments, as well as seizures.