D.C. monitoring Zika patients for problems with newborns
No babies found with microcephaly
At least one woman with the Zika virus and four others who may have been infected but were mistakenly told last year they were healthy — because of botched tests at a D.C. government lab — have since given birth, according to healthcare providers.
There have been no reports of babies born in the district in that time with microcephaly, the extreme neurological disorder associated with Zika that causes a baby's head to be small.
But Zika can result in a range of other birth defects that may not show up until a year after birth or longer, including hearing loss, irritability, difficulty swallowing, and cognitive, sensory and motor-skill problems. Children born to Zika-infected mothers need to be regularly monitored, health experts say.
The births ensure that it could be years before the full impact of mistakes made at the district's public health lab can be tallied.
The district lab erronously told at least nine pregnant women that they tested negative for Zika between July and December of last year. That's when a new lab director discovered lab workers had overdiluted a solution used in testing and erred in entering a math formula in a spreadsheet used to calculate results.
The mistakes, first made public Feb. 9, prompted officials to ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health laboratories to redo more than 400 tests that had been performed at the District lab, including those for nearly 300 pregnant women.
Jennifer Smith, the director of the District's Department of Forensic Sciences, which oversees the public health lab, said on Feb. 23 that retesting was about half-way completed and had yielded one case in which Zika had been confirmed and eight others in which results were inconclusive. In those cases, patients had markers that suggested either Zika, or a similar virus, such as dengue. Smith told the D.C. Council at the time that she expected retesting to be completed within weeks.
But the department has since declined to provide results of that retesting.
Council member Charles Allen, D-Ward 6, who chairs the council's public safety committee, said he was briefed by Smith Friday morning, who told him that an updated number of retests that confirmed a Zika infection or were inconclusive was higher than nine. He declined to elaborate, saying it was an unofficial tally and that he was told final numbers would be made public by the health lab in coming days.
The Washington Post surveyed major healthcare providers to see if any had been informed of patients with new test results that differed from their original results.