Zika by Donald G. McNeil Read Free Book Online

cutaneous and visceral leishmaniasis, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, human papillomavirus, anthrax, ricin, cryptosporidium, Chagas, Buruli ulcers, Lassa fever, mycetoma, and the common cold—which is caused by nearly 100 different viruses. I may have forgotten some.
    Also, because distrust in science among Americans is powerful, I cover some controversial diseases and persistent myths like Morgellons disease, delusional parasitosis, chronic Lyme, and the notion that vaccines cause autism.
    The UTMB media guy tried again: Dr. Weaver was also an expert in something new that was “similar to West Nile virus and could make its way to the United States in the next few years.” It was called Zika virus. Would I like an interview about that?
    Just the name had a certain zing to it. (I once interviewed a pharmaceutical executive who believed that putting the zee sound in the names of new medicines inspired a soothing credibility and sold more pills: Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax, and Zyrtec, for example. The vee sound, he thought, conveyed virility—hence, Viagra and Levitra. Their new rival, Cialis, pronounced “see Alice,” he thought, was sure to be a damp squib.)
    In early October, Dr. Weaver and I spoke for about 45 minutes.
    He described the virus’s origins in Africa and its passage through Yap Island and French Polynesia, and he said very little work had been done on it thus far. The virus had arrived recently in Brazil and was worrisome because it was causing Guillain-Barré syndrome.
    It might have spread even farther than Brazil, he said. No one knew. Only a few of the world’s top labs could test for it, including probably only one in Brazil, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
    It was particularly hard to test for in Latin America, he said, because many people had previously had dengue or had been given yellow fever shots as children. Since they were related diseases, they produced antibodies that cross-reacted with Zika antibody tests.
    If the disease ever came to the United States, he noted, it would at least be easier to test for, since dengue hadn’t infected many Americans and only a tiny number had ever had yellow fever shots. (I was one, I reflected.)
    Would it come? I asked.
    It might, he said, but it would probably suffer the same fate as Florida dengue outbreaks, a cluster of a few cases that was crushed once it was detected.
    â€œI don’t think we’ll see a major epidemic,” he said. “We stay inside our air-conditioned homes.”
    He forwarded me a 2009 paper he had coauthored naming the viruses he thought were most likely to cross the ocean and hit the Americas. It was prescient: Zika was one of them. But it was among the also-rans. The two biggest threats he saw were Japanese encephalitis and African Rift Valley fever.
    I thanked him, hung up, went through my notes to make sure I could read them in the future, scribbled his phone number and the date at the top, tore them off the legal pad, stapled them, and dropped them onto my head-scratcher pile. It’s about six inches tall and consists of stuff that strikes me as interesting enough to write a story about. Someday.
    And, for the next couple of months, that was that.
    I went back to writing about curing infant jaundice with sunlight and the long-term repercussions for China of the reality that its males smoked one-third of all the cigarettes in the world. I was also trying to arrange a difficult reporting trip: first to Bangladesh to see the world’s biggest diarrhea hospital, where crucial work had been done on a new cholera vaccine, and then to Vietnam to see whether it was true that communists are terrific at fighting tuberculosis, but would be able to declare victory only if they obtained more aid from the capitalists.
    On Monday, December 28, 2015, recently back from that trip, I was in the office. It was the week after Christmas, and very quiet. No news was breaking, and half the editors were gone,