Before October 2015, the few scientists who knew much about the Zika virus could have summed it up in two words: mostly harmless.

That’s still largely true. The virus, which is mainly spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, causes no or very mild symptoms in most people who catch it. But last October, northeastern Brazil reported an abrupt rise in the number of babies born with an abnormally small head, a condition known as microcephaly. The timing roughly coincided with outbreaks of Zika months earlier, and since then scientists have been scrambling to find out just how harmful the virus might be to fetuses.

Researchers are piling up evidence at record speed. But much of the epidemiological data from Brazil is poor, largely because a problem was only suspected months after the virus had spread through large parts of the country, and the clinical data so far available are mostly preliminary. Here,Nature summarizes what is — and isn’t — known so far about the situation.

• The size of the problem
• Confusion over ‘suspected’ cases
• Puzzling concentration of cases in Brazil’s northeast
• Zika and severe brain damage
• Inconclusive early studies
• Birth defects outside Brazil

… Read More

Image: By Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/images/microcephaly-comparison-500px.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46674502

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