Yellow fever is a viral disease of typically short duration. In most cases, symptoms include fever, chills, loss of appetite, nausea, muscle pains – particularly in the back – and headaches. Symptoms typically improve within five days. In about 15% of people, within a day of improving the fever comes back, abdominal pain occurs, and liver damage begins causing yellow skin. If this occurs, the risk of bleeding and kidney problems is increased.
Incubation period is the time elapsed between exposure to a pathogenic organism, a chemical, or radiation, and when symptoms and signs are first apparent. In a typical infectious disease, the incubation period signifies the period taken by the multiplying organism to reach a threshold necessary to produce symptoms in the host.
Aedes is a genus of mosquitoes originally found in tropical and subtropical zones, but now found on all continents except Antarctica. Some species have been spread by human activity: Aedes albopictus, a particularly invasive species, was spread to the New World, including the United States, in the 1980s, by the used-tire trade.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is an international public health agency working to improve the health and living standards of the people of the Americas. It is part of the United Nations system, serving as the Regional Office for the Americas of the World Health Organization and as the health organization of the Inter-American System. It is known in Latin America as the OPS or OPAS.
Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), commonly called Triple E or sleeping sickness, is a disease caused by a zoonotic mosquito vectored Togavirus that is present in North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean. EEE was first recognized in Massachusetts, United States, in 1831, when 75 horses died mysteriously of viral encephalitis. Epizootics in horses have continued to occur regularly in the United States. It can also be identified in donkeys and zebras. Due to the rarity of the disease, its occurrence can cause economic impact beyond the cost of horses and poultry. EEE is found today in the eastern part of the United States and is often associated with coastal plains. It can most commonly be found in East Coast and Gulf Coast states. In Florida, about one to two human cases are reported a year, although over 60 cases of equine encephalitis are reported. In years in which conditions are favorable for the disease, the number of equine cases is over 200. Diagnosing equine encephalitis is challenging because many of the symptoms are shared with other illnesses and patients can be asymptomatic. Confirmations may require a sample of cerebral spinal fluid or brain tissue, although CT scans and MRI scans are used to detect encephalitis. This could be an indication that the need to test for EEE is necessary. If a biopsy of the cerebral spinal fluid is taken, it is sent to a specialized laboratory for testing.
Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito, is a mosquito that can spread dengue fever, chikungunya, Zika fever, Mayaro and yellow fever viruses, and other disease agents. The mosquito can be recognized by white markings on its legs and a marking in the form of a lyre on the upper surface of its thorax. This mosquito originated in Africa, but is now found in tropical, subtropical and temperate regions throughout the world.
Zika fever, also known as Zika virus disease or simply Zika, is an infectious disease caused by the Zika virus. Most cases have no symptoms, but when present they are usually mild and can resemble dengue fever. Symptoms may include fever, red eyes, joint pain, headache, and a maculopapular rash. Symptoms generally last less than seven days. It has not caused any reported deaths during the initial infection. Mother-to-child transmission during pregnancy can cause microcephaly and other brain malformations in some babies. Infections in adults have been linked to Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS).
Mosquito-borne diseases or mosquito-borne illnesses are diseases caused by bacteria, viruses or parasites transmitted by mosquitoes. Nearly 700 million people get a mosquito-borne illness each year resulting in over one million deaths.
Queensland tick typhus is a zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Rickettsia australis. It is transmitted by the ticks Ixodes holocyclus and Ixodes tasmani.
Zika virus is a member of the virus family Flaviviridae. It is spread by daytime-active Aedes mosquitoes, such as A. aegypti and A. albopictus. Its name comes from the Ziika Forest of Uganda, where the virus was first isolated in 1947. Zika virus shares a genus with the dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, and West Nile viruses. Since the 1950s, it has been known to occur within a narrow equatorial belt from Africa to Asia. From 2007 to 2016, the virus spread eastward, across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas, leading to the 2015–2016 Zika virus epidemic.
Jon Andrus, an American physician, epidemiologist and immunization specialist, is the former deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
The 2013–2014 chikungunya outbreak represented the first recorded outbreak of the disease outside of tropical Africa and Asia. In December 2013, the first locally transmitted case of chikungunya in the Americas was detected in Saint Martin. Shortly after the first case the disease began to spread rapidly throughout the Caribbean region. By the end of the year, it had spread to Martinique and Guadeloupe, with suspected cases in Saint Barthélemy. By the end of January 2014, cases had been confirmed in Saint Barthélemy, as well as the British Virgin Islands, Dominica, and French Guiana. On the basis of 4,000 confirmed cases and over 30,000 suspected cases, the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) declared a Caribbean-wide epidemic of the virus in early May. By the end of May, four cases of chikungunya had been confirmed in Florida. By July 2014 there were an estimated 355,000 cases in the Caribbean. By August 2014, 25 Caribbean countries had confirmed at least one case. The epidemic was over by 2015.
The Amazon Malaria Initiative (AMI) is a regional program that was created in 2001 by several countries sharing the Amazon basin with technical support from PAHO/WHO and financial support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and managed by USAID/Peru as part of its South American Regional Infectious Disease Program (SARI). The initiative uses a multi-pronged approach to achieve the overall aims of preventing and controlling malaria and reducing malaria-related morbidity and mortality in countries of the Americas. AMI priorities for malaria prevention are as follows, diagnosis and treatment, drug resistance and epidemiological surveillance, vector control, pharmaceutical management, quality of medicines, communication and networking.
An epidemic of Zika fever, caused by Zika virus, began in Brazil and affected other countries in the Americas from April 2015 to November 2016. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the end of the epidemic in November 2016, but noted that the virus still represents "a highly significant and long term problem". It is estimated that 1.5 million people were infected by Zika virus in Brazil, with over 3,500 cases of infant microcephaly reported between October 2015 and January 2016. The epidemic also affected other parts of South and North America, as well as several islands in the Pacific.
This article primarily covers the chronology of the 2015–16 Zika virus epidemic. Flag icons denote the first announcements of confirmed cases by the respective nation-states, their first deaths, and relevant sessions and announcements of the World Health Organization (WHO), and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), as well as relevant virological, epidemiological, and entomological studies.
The Global Virus Network (GVN) is an international coalition of medical virologists whose goal is to help the international medical community by improving the detection and management of viral diseases. The network was founded in 2011 by Robert Gallo in collaboration with William Hall and Reinhard Kurth, and 24 countries were members of the network as of 2015. The GVN fosters research into viruses that cause human disease to promote the development of diagnostics, antiviral drugs and vaccines, and its mission includes strengthening scientific training and response mechanisms to viral outbreaks. The GVN has organized task forces for chikungunya, human T-lymphotropic virus, and Zika. The network is headquartered at the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and Gallo serves as its scientific director.
On 20 January 2016, the health minister of Angola reported 23 cases of yellow fever with 7 deaths among Eritrean and Congolese citizens living in Angola in Viana municipality, a suburb of the capital of Luanda. The first cases were reported in Eritrean visitors beginning on 5 December 2015 and confirmed by the Pasteur WHO reference laboratory in Dakar, Senegal in January. The outbreak was classified as an urban cycle of yellow fever transmission, which can spread rapidly. A preliminary finding that the strain of the yellow fever virus was closely related to a strain identified in a 1971 outbreak in Angola was confirmed in August 2016. Moderators from ProMED-mail stressed the importance of initiating a vaccination campaign immediately to prevent further spread. The CDC classified the outbreak as Watch Level 2 on 7 April 2016. The WHO declared it a grade 2 event on its emergency response framework having moderate public health consequences.
John ("Jack") Payne Woodall (1935–2016) was a British/American entomologist and virologist who made significant contributions to the study of arboviruses in South America, the Caribbean and Africa. He did research on the causative agents of dengue fever, Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever, o'nyong'nyong fever, yellow fever, Zika fever, and others. He served as a staff member of the Rockefeller Foundation, and director of the Foundation's laboratory in Brazil, as a research fellow at the Yale Arbovirus Research Unit, was head of the Arbovirus Laboratory for the New York State Health Department, and worked for the Centers for Disease Control. Woodall spent 13 years at the World Health Organization developing and evaluating health programs. After retirement in 2007, he continued as a consultant and professor at the Institute of Medical Biochemistry in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he had worked since 1998. In 1994, he cofounded the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED-mail). Woodall's emails concluded with a quote from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, "God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I'm so far behind I will never die."
The Zika Authorization Plan Act of 2016 was a bill introduced in the second session of the United States 114th Congress by Representative Curt Clawson (R-FL) on February 12, 2016. The bill was prompted by the Zika virus health scare and was aimed at reducing the spread of the virus.
Science diplomacy is the collaborative efforts by local and global entities to solve global issues using science and technology as a base. In science diplomacy, collaboration takes place to advance science but science can also be used to facilitate diplomatic relations. This allows even conflicting nations to come together through science to find solutions to global issues. Global organizations, researchers, public health officials, countries, government officials, and clinicians have previously worked together to create effective measures of infection control and subsequent treatment. They continue to do so through sharing of resources, research data, ideas, and by putting into effect laws and regulations that can further advance scientific research. Without the collaborative efforts of such entities, the world would not have the vaccines and treatments we now possess for diseases that were once considered deadly such as tuberculosis, tetanus, polio, influenza, etc. Historically, science diplomacy has proved successful in diseases such as SARS, Ebola, Zika and continues to be relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic today.
