History of Zika

It wasn't a virus that anybody thought would be a problem. My name is Emily Lee. I'm a fourth year Ph.D. student at Florida State University and I work in Dr. Hengli Tang's lab where we study the zika virus. For seven decades nobody really thought this virus was a problem. It was isolated in a rhesus macaque. It's a type of monkey in the Uganda Zika Forest, that's where it got its name. So scientists said 'Oh we found a new virus it's called the Zika virus after the forest and then they looked for it in different populations of people, they found it in a type of mosquito the next year, they found I think about they documented maybe 14 infections over the next 60 years, just 14 human infections, there were probably more but the infections so mild that people didn't really care about it. Something crazy happened in 2007 in Micronesia, the...Yap island is the population, it was a population, of about 7,000 people, 5,000 people were infected with Zika virus within two months which was unheard of. Then the World Health Organization kind of said hey maybe we should keep an eye on this but people are getting sick but nothing's really happening so maybe it's not a big deal.Then I think it was 2013...2014 French Polynesia got hit pretty hard, so it was about I want to say 20,000 people were infected in six or seven months and then some Guillain-Barré syndrome started increasing I think that year they went from having an average of two patients a year with Guillain-Barré to 42 which is a big increase, that's a lot of people. Late 2015 there was a huge outbreak in Brazil that made scientists really concerned.We don't know what's going on so one theory is that zika might have been around but in Africa you might have had people with immunity to it and so even if they were getting infected their immune system was shutting it down so quickly that you wouldn't see these issues come up but the idea is that either it had been moving into naive populations so people who had never seen this virus before and now they're getting sick or it could be the virus actually mutated and changed itself in some way that's now causing these disease symptoms that weren’t seen before. Zika's closely related to a couple other viruses like dengue virus and yellow fever virus and so it's really hard to tell if those people have immunity to dengue or if they have immunity to zika because the viruses look so similar to the host, like people, that their body might have antibodies against zika but they've never seen zika, so it's a complicated, kind of a complex field. Zika virus is currently spreading; It's now gone to active transmission in over 67 countries now including the United States.