Zika

This campaign cannot forestall new Zika virus outbreaks.

We can't combat a disease like Zika that recognizes no borders — mosquitos don't respect walls — unless we make permanent the same urgency that we brought to bear against Ebola — by strengthening our own systems of public health, by investing in cures and rolling back the root causes of disease, and helping poorer countries develop a public health infrastructure.

The World Health Organization (WHO) lists the Nipah virus as a developing disease that could cause a global pandemic. Ebola and Zika are also on this list.

The Zika virus spread rapidly across central and south America.

Researchers in the United States have identified a number of drug compounds that stop the spread of the Zika virus, potentially protecting pregnant women and their unborn babies from the mosquito-borne illness. One of the compounds already is used to treat tapeworms.

Chan says a high-level meeting convened by WHO looked at the scientific evidence linking Zika infections with malformation and neurological disorders.

Researchers have discovered the strongest evidence yet linking the Zika virus to the paralytic illness Guillain-Barre syndrome.

The mosquito that carries the Zika virus lays its eggs in old tires, water cisterns, bottle caps—any place where there's a drop or two of water.

The CDC had an advisement for men who have recently traveled to areas with Zika.

Researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland and Harvard University in Boston said in June that they had developed two vaccines against Zika that protected mice. Since then, a third vaccine, using a harmless cold virus, has been developed, and all of them shielded nonhuman primates against the mosquito-borne virus in experiments reported this week in the journal Science.

Dr Umair A Shah, executive director of the Harris County department of public health, said, “It’s probably not a case of if we get zika in our native mosquitoes, it’s probably a case of when we get zika in our native mosquitoes.”