Zika Virus The Latest Global Health Emergency

The international news in recent weeks has been flooded with reports and opinions about what is referred to as the Zika Virus. The World Health Organization declared the Zika virus and its suspected link to birth defects an international public health emergency, which represents an uncommon classification that is meant to signal the seriousness of the outbreak and prepare countries around the world to quickly position themselves in such a way that they can mitigate the worst consequences of the virus (Tavernise & McNeil, 2016). Despite the seriousness of the threats issued by international health leaders, most of the common symptoms associated with Zika are relatively mild in nature and typically only last for a few days to a week. About one in five individuals infected are thought to become sick and their symptoms include things such as (CDC, 2016):

Fever, rash, and conjunctivitis (red eyes)

Joint Pain, muscle pain, headaches

Furthermore, the virus is thought to only last in the blood for a few days and the chances of a severe reaction to the virus that requires hospitalization are uncommon and deaths from the virus are even rarer.

Although the most common symptoms associated with Zika are not life threatening, organizations...

After patients in these countries had experienced symptoms consistent with the Zika virus in these countries, there were cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) and associated neurological symptoms. Given the fact that these instances have increased irregularly throughout these countries, researchers believe that there may be a connection and there have also similar situations are being investigated in other countries of the Americas and these findings are consistent with a temporal and spatial link between Zika virus circulation and the increase of GBS (WHO, 2016). Based on these observations, an emergency situation has been established even that the etiopathogenesis and associated risk factors are not yet clearly understood.
Other evidence suggests that there might also be a link between Zika and microcephaly. The term refers to a rare neurological condition in which children have unusually small heads and in many cases it also means a baby's brain is…