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By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
TUESDAY, Feb. 23, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- Teams of American and Brazilian scientists will travel on Tuesday to areas of Brazil hit hard by the Zika virus, in hopes of confirming a link between Zika and a severe infant birth defect.
Babies born to mothers infected with the mosquito-borne virus can have microcephaly, a condition where infants have smaller heads and the potential for long-term developmental issues.
Brazil has already recorded more than 4,100 such cases, and while links to prenatal exposure to the Zika virus are strong, they have yet to be confirmed.
According to the Associated Press, the new research initiative is a partnership between Brazil's Health Ministry and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers plan to compare infants born with microcephaly and their mothers against infants born without the birth defect.
Eight teams, comprised of one CDC expert plus three Brazilian health workers, will go door to door to randomly selected families with new babies living in Paraiba, a state on Brazil's northeast coast. They hope to recruit at least 130 babies with microcephaly and compare them to almost triple that number of infants without the condition, the AP said. All will undergo blood tests looking for infection with Zika and another mosquito-borne virus, dengue.
"If we can provide some basic information or show a potential association [between a virus and microcephaly], that will allow us another avenue of how do we prevent this and what do we need to do next," Erin Staples, a Colorado-based epidemiologist who heads the CDC contingent in Paraiba, told the AP.
The study's launch comes a day after President Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.9 billion to help stem the spread of the Zika virus.
Since it first surfaced last spring, the virus has spread to 30 countries and territories in Latin America and the Caribbean. The World Health Organization now estimates there could be up to 4 million cases of Zika in the Americas in the next year.
Meeting Monday with the nation's governors, Obama said he hoped to work with them in guarding against an outbreak of the disease in this country.