Center for Global Health Policy’s “Science Speaks”: Zika: An emergency evolves into an enduring public health threat with long-term demands
Antigone Barton, senior editor and writer of “Science Speaks,” discusses questions and challenges around Zika research, funding, and response, writing, “[U]nknowns include the capacity of countries with fewer resources than Brazil to track the spread of the virus, to detect its impacts, [and] to respond to the needs that those impacts make … Unknowns also include the lineage of a virus that went nearly unnoticed for more than six decades, before traveling across an increasingly close-knit world and confirming its potential for harm in the most vulnerable communities in [the Western] hemisphere. And, of course, questions include how to develop the tools needed — diagnostic, programmatic, and preventive — to end the threat the virus poses” (11/28).