The Zika Virus
Date: Monday 5th December 2016
Time: 7pm
Venue: the Victorian Bar, Tron Theatre
Speakers: Dr Claire Donald
The current Zika virus outbreak is a major public health issue in the Americas. Although previously thought to be innocuous, it has recently caused large scale outbreaks in a number of countries over the past decade which have been associated with neurological syndromes, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome and microcephaly, not observed in earlier infections. This unanticipated spread combined with the new disease symptoms lead to the World Health Organisation declaring a global health emergency in February 2016. So how did this happen? What caused the virus to change? What were these changes? Should we be worried about what could happen to Zika and other viruses in the future?
Claire is a post-doctoral researcher at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research. Her PhD research focused on the innate antiviral immune responses of mosquitoes against arboviral infections. She is currently working on the interactions between Zika virus and the human immune response in order to understand why the recent virus outbreaks have been associated with neurological conditions, such as guillain-barré syndrome and microcephaly, which were not observed previously.