Every year, an estimated 390 million people are infected with dengue, a mosquito-borne virus with symptoms that can include headache, joint pain, and nausea, and could even cause death. There's no specific treatment for dengue, and while there are several vaccines being tested, there currently aren't any on the market, in part because none have been effective enough. Now one of these experimental vaccines has hit a major milestone: It was 100 percent effective in a small clinical trial. The researchers reported their results this week in Science Translational Medicine.
Since the first case was diagnosed in April 2015 in Brazil, the Zika virus has spread throughout the Americas. While mosquito-borne virus has fairly mild, flu-like symptoms, it's also thought to cause microcephaly, a birth defect in which babies are born with heads that are smaller than normal. Because mosquito bites are so hard to prevent and there's currently no vaccine or treatment for Zika, the World Health Organization has declared Zika a global public health emergency. Yesterday the governor of Florida declared a state of emergency in the state's nine counties in which cases of Zika have been diagnosed.
Up until a few months ago, most had never heard of the Zika Forest in Uganda, or the virus that bears this region's name. Today, news of the infectious disease is spreading across the US sparking fear and concern. The mosquito-borne virus has gripped many parts of Brazil and has been found in many adjacent countries. It now threatens the United States as transmission has already been found in Puerto Rico. At this moment, there have been no locally-acquired cases in the rest of America but that may change with the coming spring and summer months.
