Expectant mothers do not infect their children

Expectant mothers do not infect their children

• Experts point out that there is no vertical transmission of influenza A virus
• In the last months of gestation increases the risk of complications in the mother

A pregnant woman doing yoga.

Najat, weighed 4.2 pounds at birth and is healthy, free of influenza A/H1N1. His mother died this weekend due to the disease within three days of giving birth to small, becoming the first victim of the virus Andalusian.

Like Rayan, who was born healthy at 28 weeks gestation without 'trace' of influenza virus A. Dalila His mother became the first fatality in Spain. Her son died days after birth due to medical negligence at the Hospital Gregorio Marañón, the same medical center where she inaugurated the statistics of deaths from infectious disease in our country.

Serve these two examples and the call for calm by the experts to remind all women who were currently pregnant, "the transmission of influenza A virus does not exist. The horizontal transmission is through airways, "insists Juan García de Lomas, head of the Microbiology Unit of Hospital Clínico de Valencia.

Ana Fernandez Sesma, Department of Microbiology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine makes this point. "The flu virus can not be acquired either by mouth or by blood but by aerosol in the airways of a person to another. The virus replicates in the lungs of the mother and does not cause systemic disease or reaches the blood ".

To further understand this process, Dr. Lomas said that acts differently to other viruses. "The flu is not like that rubella is contracted by the respiratory route and that at 5 days or week of the infection appears in the blood, and spreads through the body. It is thus able to cross the placenta and infect the fetus. "

On the contrary, "the influenza A virus never reaches the bloodstream. Only in the case of a mother with cough illness in your newborn during childbirth may lead to the infection, a fact which is unlikely," adds .

In the same opinion shows Jose Ramon Yuste, an internist specializing in infectious diseases at the University Clinic of Navarra. "There is no evidence of transmission from mother to child or influenza A or the seasons. All children born to women with the disease have been healthy."

They recognize, however, that the fact that pregnant women are considered a risk group is clearly something that has happened before. "In the three previous pandemics was observed that morbidity and symptoms were higher among pregnant women. Everything should be a natural physiological process by which cellular immunity woman descends to allow growth of the embryo or fetus. The decline of immune cells is greatest during late pregnancy, so the risk of complications rises, "said Valencia specialist.

But also other factor. "The body has no 'memory' of this type of flu. That is, no virus antibodies generated by previous infections causing helplessness against rising" remark.

In fact, as reported by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta [U.S. CDC] have recently been published in the journal The Lancet, the rate of hospitalization of pregnant women with influenza A is four times higher the general population and over 10% of deaths triggered by the disease across the Atlantic have occurred in pregnant women.

Indeed, Dr. Yuste recalls that in this same work, "muses on the possibility that influenza also causes systemic infection [move into the blood], which can cause the fetus to catch, but it also recognizes that not there is evidence that this infection occurs because babies born to mothers who have passed both influenza A, such as seasonal symptoms and had no infection.