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The 2015 Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreak in Brazil has led to global concern about the impact of the virus
and widespread fear of transmission beyond their borders. This essay aims to address the issues about
ZIKV that have arisen, including the background of the virus, the significance of understanding the
virus, and establishing an understanding of why ZIKV has had such a huge impact in Brazil.
ZIKV before Brazil
ZIKV is of the Flaviviridae family, which includes other flaviviruses such as dengue. It is transmitted
through an arthropod vector, thus is an arbovirus. ZIKV is an icosahedral enveloped virus, with a
positive-sense, single-stranded RNA genome that is non-segmented1. ZIKV manifests in fever, joint
swelling, rash and headaches in patients. Only 1 in 4 develop these symptoms. With the incubation
period taking up to 12 days, and the infection only lasting up to 7, ZIKV was considered a mild virus2.
Fig. 1: The 3.7 resolution cryoEM structure of ZIKV 3
The virus was first identified in Uganda in 1947. It was first discovered and isolated in humans in
Uganda and Tanzania in 1952. The earliest documented epidemics were in 2007, in the islands of Yap
and Gabon. Another outbreak was well-documented in French Polynesia in 2013-144. Before the 2015
outbreak in Brazil, the vectors by which ZIKV is transmitted were determined to be mosquitoes of the
Culicidae family and Aedes genus5. Not much concern was given to ZIKV before Brazil, and research
had not discovered any cause for worry, making the outbreak of ZIKV and the corresponding increase
of microcephaly cases in Brazil all the more surprising.
There are other factors which could explain the sudden increase of microcephaly, chief of which is
that Brazil could have underreported its microcephaly cases before the ZIKV outbreak, and
overreported them after. The 150 microcephaly cases in 2014 out of 3 million live births in Brazil was
small to the 2,500 of 4 million live births in the US, according to the CDC epidemiologist Margaret
Honein11. Microcephaly is hard to diagnose, and might lead to misdiagnoses in Brazil, especially since
the panic over ZIKV has set in.
Conclusion
As the number of microcephaly cases in Brazil increase, finding the appropriate treatment for ZIKV is
of paramount importance. However, other factors cannot be ruled out, since, more often than not,
diseases are a complex result of the interplay between multiple factors.
Bibliography
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