Zika Virus and the Intersection of Medical and Legal Triage
JURIST - Academic/Commentary, Feb. 18, 2016,
Posted: 24 Feb 2016
Date Written: February 18, 2016
Abstract
On the heels of the 2014 Ebola outbreak (with just a few remaining cases in Sierra Leone), the world faces its next major threat from an emerging infectious agent — Zika virus (ZIKV). Originally discovered in Uganda in 1947, ZIKV, like Ebola, was largely dormant for decades. Limited outbreaks among smaller populations in the Yap Islands (2007) and French Polynesian Islands (2013) raised some public health flags. However, ZIKV's emergence in South and Latin Americas in 2015 through global migration of mosquitoes and human travel patterns escalates this threat to emergency levels.
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