For Pregnant Central American Migrants, Zika Doesn't Rank High on List of Concerns Laura Tillman - The Los Angeles Times
go to original March 31, 2016

Hilda Rosa Baca Garcia, 26, made the journey from Honduras to a shelter in Ixtepec, Mexico, despite being six months pregnant. She had heard of Zika, but lumped it together with a number of dangers and diseases she might face. (Laura Tillman/For The Times)

In Ana Patricia Gomez Diaz's El Salvador, the government has advised women to avoid pregnancy for two years because of concerns about the Zika virus, but the mother of two with the kind smile was already pregnant and en route to the United States over a month before the alarm sounded.

Speaking at a shelter in southern Mexico in March, Gomez Diaz, now seven months pregnant, said she'd never heard of the virus, which health experts suspect can cause severe birth defects in babies born to mothers exposed during pregnancy.

El Salvador, along with other countries affected by Zika, has waged a campaign to inform and track pregnant women who may have been exposed to the virus. But like many migrants at the shelter in Ixtepec, an unfamiliar ailment and a hypothetical birth defect do not rate high on her list of concerns.

Here in the purgatory between her home and the one she hopes to make in the United States, Gomez Diaz has other things on her mind.

...At the Hermanos en el Camino shelter in Ixtepec, Gomez Diaz was one of four pregnant women in early March seeking respite before continuing a longer journey.

The shelter, founded by Father Alejandro Solalinde Guerra in 2007, each year houses as many as 15,000 migrants. Here migrants pass the time talking, playing dominoes, resting on mattresses or avoiding members of rival gangs from their home countries, as they wait for humanitarian visas or simply find food and shelter before continuing north.

Read the rest at The Los Angeles Times

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