Health officials
on Friday reported the first baby born in New York City with the Zika - related birth defect known as microcephaly, a
condition marked by an abnormally small head and impaired
brain development.
Doctors often treat the
condition by patching the good eye and forcing the
brain to rely
on the other eye, but the treatment risks damaging vision in the good eye, and if it doesn't succeed or occur early enough in a child's visual
development, the vision loss in the impaired eye can be permanent.
The first 5 years of life are critical for the
development of language and cognitive skills.1 By kindergarten entry, steep social gradients in reading and math ability, with successively poorer outcomes for children in families of lower social class, are already apparent.2 — 4 Early cognitive ability is, in turn, predictive of later school performance, educational attainment, and health in adulthood5 — 7 and may serve as a marker for the quality of early
brain development and a mechanism for the transmission of future health inequalities.8 Early life represents a time period of most equality and yet, beginning with in utero
conditions and extending through early childhood, a wide range of socially stratified risk and protective factors may begin to place children
on different trajectories of cognitive
development.9, 10