Emily Oster

1 min Read Emily Oster

Emily Oster

Fast Facts: Zika

This is one thing you probably shouldn't worry about

Emily Oster

1 min Read

I would say the #1 question I get on Instagram/Twitter/Email is about Zika. “Should I have my babymoon in Mexico?” “Can I visit my parents in St. Thomas?” “I might get pregnant in 2023, should I avoid entire swaths of the world until then?” And so on.

Zika is scary. If you remember back to, say, 2016 it was all over the news and the evidence still suggests that Zika infection in pregnancy can cause birth defects.

But: Zika has really, really died down in the last few years. In 2019 there were an estimated 20 cases of traveler-acquired Zika among Americans (that’s not 20 pregnant women, that’s 20 people). This is 20 cases on a base of, perhaps, 20 to 40 million trips. Whether you choose to travel or not is up to you; and the risk isn’t zero. But the chance of Zika infection is, literally, about 1 in a million.

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