the_other_paul

How do medical/public health authorities plan to determine if microcephaly cases are indeed linked to Zika?

It's highly unlikely that the release of Oxitec's genetically modified mosquitoes has any connection to the Zika/microcephaly--the modifications to the mosquitoes wouldn't make them more likely to cause health problems in humans, and the mosquitoes were released a long distance from the area where Zika first broke out in Brazil. Here's a good article about it.

Apparently the plaque reduction neutralization test is another antibody test that can be used to distinguish Zika from dengue, but the procedure seems like a big hassle compared to ELISA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaque_reduction_neutralization_test

Yeah, case control studies seem like the right strategy. Will they be able to supplement the participants' histories with any kind of specimen-gathering or testing? Would antibody testing (to learn about past Zika infection) be useful for a case-control study?

This brochure has a map of the distributions of the two mosquitoes that transmit Zika. Aedes aegypti seems to be the main one that's transmitting it. Here's a map of A. aegypti in the Americas, and here's A. albopictus.

The only scenario I can think of where the mosquitoes spread to colder areas would be due to climate change; I don't know if anyone's predicting that it'll happen soon. Aedes aegypti seems to prefer altitudes below 1,000 meters, but had been found higher up (try googling "a. aegypti altitude range").