Desideratum: a developmentalist view of Zika virus infection

Abstract

Zika virus was first isolated from the blood of a rhesus macaque during a study on yellow fever transmission in the Zika forest in Uganda in the late 1940s.1 In the following years, the virus, transmitted through Aedes mosquitos, remained, besides reports on local case series, almost unrecognised until the 2007 outbreak in the Federated States of Micronesia. It was another 8 years later that the 2015–16 epidemic in Brazil suddenly brought Zika virus into the spotlight because of unexpected severe neurological complications.