Jerome Groopman of the New Yorker admonishes that "even though the spectre of Zika is fading, it's wise to stay vigilant." It is without a doubt that Zika was on the minds of people the world just over a year ago, the confusion and uncertainty surrounding its spread making it all the more terrifying. Pregnant women cancelled travel plans to foreign countries with documented outbreaks of the virus and the numerous cases of babies being born with microencephaly. Even Olympic athletes refused to participate in the summer games because of the virus' prevalence in Brazil. However, the world was seemingly abuzz for a relatively short amount of time and the virus never fully penetrated the continental United States and Europe. This may have been due to the rather timely destruction of mosquito communities around the world, but even that wouldn't explain the rapid decline in the spread of the virus and number of documented complications from it.
So, what happened to Zika? The question has left many epidemiologists baffled and others worried. The concerns mainly come from the fact that Zika does not exist in a vacuum, meaning that the suppression of Zika in a host could potentially worsen the infection of another virus. The director of the N.I.H. vaccine program, Anthony Fauci, says that his team is "poised to increase the number of participants in the [vaccine] trial, or to shift the location of testing to new hot spots." This plan comes with a sense of foreboding in light of the World Health Organization's recent statement that Zika no longer is a global emergency. The development of an efficient and economical vaccine is becoming all the more important in the face of what could be a crisis now dormant.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/is-zika-gone-for-good
-Andrew Moreno
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment