Third death is linked to Zika virus in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s Health Ministry said Thursday that a 20-year-old woman infected with Zika has become the country’s third adult fatality linked to the virus.

After f alling ill last April, the woman began coughing up blood and died after a 12-day hospitalization, according to Brazilian government researchers. The cause of death was registered as pneumonia, but her blood samples later tested positive for Zika.

Brazilian researchers said the patient’s respiratory problems were unusual for a case of Zika, so other factors could have contributed to her death.

“She could have developed bronchial pneumonia and the association with the Zika virus made this worse,” said Pedro Vasconcelos, the Brazilian government scientist who led the tests.

The woman is among the first adult f atalities that health officials have attributed to Zika, which is transmitted primarily by mosquitoes and is projected to infect as many as 4 million people in the Americas this year, the World Health Organization said.

Brazil’s government blames Zika for a sharp increase in babies born with abnormally small heads, a condition known as microcephaly.

There have been several deaths that are suspected to have a Zika connection. In Colombia, authorities last week said three Zikainfected patients had died of complications related to a temporary form of paralysis known as GuillainBarré syndrome, which has been linked to the virus.

Brazil has recorded two miscarriages by a Zikainfected mother and two cases of infants who had Zika and microcephaly and died within 20 hours of birth, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers say they don’t yet understand whether the virus itself poses a mortal threat or how it might interact with other diseases or infections such as pneumonia.

“It is not possible to say that the Zika virus was the exclusive cause of death” in the most recently announced case, Claudio Maiorovitch, the Brazilian Health Ministry’s director of transmissible diseases, told reporters Thursday. “We don’t know enough about the behavior of this virus in its interaction with the human body.”

One of the Zika patients who died in Brazil last year also had lupus. The other was a 16-year-old girl who had no serious health problems before being infected with Zika.

Researchers don’t know yet to what extent Zika poses a threat to patients whose defenses are compromised by other diseases such as lupus, said Daniel Lucey, an infectious-disease specialist at Georgetown University Medical Center.