ViroBlogy

With limited laboratory capacity and a lack of experts and funding, an outbreak of the Zika virus in Africa could be problematic.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: theconversation.com

Yeah…sure.  It could be Bad.

BUT: as South African epidemiologists have pointed out, it’ll only be a problem IF the mosquito that transmits it elsewhere, comes here – because our local A aegypti doesn’t have the same behaviour, and will vastly outnumber and possibly outcompete any import variety.

And it’s endemic in tropical Africa – meaning many people are immune already.

So scaremongering about Zika in Africa is possibly a little irresponsible – unless it’s being used as a stalking horse for an agenda for setting up continent-wide arbovirus surveillance, or spurring on efforts to set up an African CDC.  Which I would heartily endorse.

The stuff about lack of reagents is spot-on: which is why we have a proposal in the works to provide just such, using plants to it.  Watch this space….

See on Scoop.it – Virology News

This entry was posted on 10 February, 2016 at 07:14 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.