The £4.7m project, involving the universities of Manchester and Liverpool, and Public Health England, aims to have trials on humans up and running within the next three years.
The news comes two and a half years after the Zika virus, which can lead to foetal abnormalities, began to appear in Brazil.
When cases of babies born with abnormally small heads were first reported in late 2015, Brazilians were frightened and bewildered. Few had heard of the rare birth defect microcephaly, or were aware that it restricts growth of the skull and can cause learning, cognitive and motor difficulties. Nor did scientists know why cases were concentrated in Brazil’s impoverished, dry north-east. Two and a half years later, they still don’t.
The Brazilian government quickly blamed Zika – an obscure, mosquito-borne virus, previously unknown in the Americas. The World Health Organization declared a public health emergency, and panic grew as Zika spread across the region.
Then the outbreak petered out, leaving Brazil with more than 3,000 babies affected by what its government calls “developmental and growth alternations possibly related to Zika virus infection”.
Two-thirds of those children are here in the north-east. As of December, 438 were in the state of Pernambuco. Yet just 700-odd cases of what is now called congenital Zika syndrome have been confirmed across the whole of the rest of the Americas, according to the Pan American Health Organization. And nobody can explain the discrepancy.
Source: theguardian
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