This is a story that began long ago, in a small forest in Uganda on the banks of a great
lake. ...a story about something so tiny that it
lived in the belly of a mosquito.
Yet loomed large in the imagination of a little boy named Andrew Haddow, who learned of it
from his grandfather’s tales.
Andrew grew up to be a scientist who studies insects,
And this tiny something grew into a terrible force,
an epidemic we call Zika.
And when it left the forest to spread harm around the Earth,
Andrew found himself in the middle of a science mystery...
...that began on a day long before he was born.
April of 1947, the original isolation of Zika virus made by Dick, Kitchen, and my grandfather,
Alexander John Haddow; he went by ‘Alec.’
Andrew’s grandfather, Alec Haddow, discovered Zika during a decades-long hunt for yellow
fever in the rainforests of East Africa.
Here's a picture of my grandfather.
I mean, he looks like a pirate.
He kind of just did his own thing.
The tales of his adventures inspired Andrew as a young boy...
...stories of my grandfather going out into the bush...about elephants and wildlife and
everything...so exciting to a little kid.
Sometimes they were medical mysteries...
...numerous bedtime stories involving viruses
His favorite: the stories about Zika.
I think why Zika appealed to me was this idea of the tower.
This mythical, giant, steel tower.
Alec Haddow designed this tower to conduct experiments in and above the tropical forest
canopy of Uganda.
And, you know, to a four or five-year-old, that's...pretty cool.
...catching mosquitoes, and studying monkeys...
The tower had various platforms
They would put monkeys up in the canopy to get bitten by mosquitos, in experiments designed
to examine the spread of Yellow Fever in the jungle.
If a monkey became sick, they tested its blood
They were actually looking for Yellow Fever virus.
One day, when a bitten monkey became ill...
Sentinel rhesus monkey number MR 766...
...their tests for yellow fever came up negative.
They didn’t know what they had; they just knew they had something.
And, it turned out it was a new virus.
As is often the custom in virology, discoveries are named after where they are found.
And so Haddow and his team named the virus after the forest in Uganda where their tower
stood: Zika.
The Lugandan spelling has two “I’s.”
Over the course of their expedition, the team identified and studied about a dozen viruses
in all.
Yet the discovery of Zika virus drew little notice.
I don't think they thought much of it; it wasn't associated with human illness—
And so the virus slipped into obscurity in the half century that followed...
But Andrew never forgot about Zika.
Since I, you know, was 3 or 4 years old I wanted to be a researcher.
I didn’t exactly know at the time what a researcher was, but I knew I wanted to do
that.
And he did.
In 2009, Andrew came to the University of Texas Medical branch to work with Drs. Scott
Weaver and Robert Tesh, in one of the few places studying the Zika virus.
You could count them on one hand the number of laboratories doing anything with Zika.
They had the world’s largest collection...
about thirty strains of the virus.
...including one that was very important to Andrew...
The prototype strain; the original isolation of Zika.
...your grandfather’s virus.
...from his hand, in a sense, to my hand.
Starting at Zika’s origins, with the very strain that his grandfather discovered...
Strain IBH...30...656...
Nigeria 1968
...Andrew set out to learn everything he could about this virus, that was about to
spread throughout the world.
41519...
...For over half a century, Zika was mostly confined to the tropics through Africa, India,
and South East Asia.
It was a virus so rare, that only 14 confirmed cases of Zika illness had ever been documented
in humans.
But a series of unexpected events would challenge everything they thought they knew about the virus.
Starting here on Yap Island...
a very small island only about 7,000 people live there, but more than half of them became
infected with Zika virus.
it was just, "woah, you know.
Zika is causing an outbreak, like a big outbreak."
But the outbreak was still characterized by a very mild disease, uh, fever, rash, nothing
particularly serious...
Or so they thought.
Zika had gone back into hiding.
For now.
But two years later, Andrew would again cross paths with the virus.
And it would reveal a bizarre secret.
Something was very strange with this virus.
Something that I don’t think anybody could anticipate.
A medical mystery that Andrew came upon and solved, in a chance meeting.
The diagnosis was made in a bar, over a beer in a bar in Senegal.
It all started in the summer of 2009 when I met Kevin Kobylinski.
We started having a conversation.
Kevin's my graduate student.
He's in Australia right now.
Hey Kevin.
Hey, Brian.
Hey, Andrew.
We were talking about you and Andrew in the bar in Senegal.
Excellent.
After we talked about our various projects...
Right.
Right...
Kevin started to describe an illness that he and Brian came down with the year earlier.
Brian and Kevin were in Senegal working on a project.
...collecting mosquitoes out of people's huts...
And when they flew back to Fort Collins, Colorado, where they lived, they started to feel sick.
Brian and I started having similar symptoms.
Symptoms like a rash, headache, and joint pain.
And then, we had our blood drawn...
And called up the CDC...
The Centers for Disease Control conducted a series of tests...
Dengue...
Yellow Fever...
Chikungunya...
...for the usual suspects.
And the results?
Negative.
Negative, negative, negative.
The most common ones were ruled out.
They still didn't know what they had been infected with.
Kevin, Brian, and the CDC were confounded by this mystery illness.
So, we stuck our serum samples in the freezer and left it for another day.
And that day came when Kevin and Andrew had their chance meeting in Senegal.
A year later, we're at this bar having this discussion and, um, the picture became a lot
more clear.
First words out of your mouth were that the symptoms sounded just like—
Zika!
At least that was Andrew’s theory.
What else is there?
But he needed proof.
I'm just like, "Oh my God.
We've got to get these samples..."
Like, I so wanted their blood.
He said that the laboratory that he was working at definitely could perform the antibody test.
I’ll have Dr. Tesh run it.
Then Kevin takes a sip of beer and says, "Well, there’s one more thing:
Brian's wife got sick too."
His wife started having the rash and feeling bad and swelling in her joints.
Same signs and symptoms, very interesting.
And she was not in Southeastern Senegal.
No, she was not.
What peaked their interest was this...
The mosquitos that transmit Zika live in warm places, like the tropics.
If this was in fact a Zika infection, how could Brian’s wife have possibly contracted
the disease in Colorado?
It's a tropical virus that can’t be transmitted by mosquitoes in Northern Colorado.
They ruled out other means of transmission as well.
The smoking gun seemed to be a rather unusual set of symptoms Brian experienced:
...prostatitis and hematospermia...
...which is?
...blood in the semen and inflamed prostate.
That's when we became excited about the possibility of it being, uh, sexually-transmitted.
Sexually transmitted?
A very novel and risky hypothesis.
Totally out there.
Indeed.
It was believed that the only way people could get an infection like this, was through mosquitos.
Sexual transmission, if it were the case, would be a revolutionary finding.
Like saying a car can drive on a square wheels.
But of course they were getting ahead of themselves...
We had no idea what we actually even had...so...
They hadn’t yet identified what the virus was.
Well, I have here the serologic results.
Then, Dr. Tesh revealed his findings.
Kevin, Brian, and Brian's wife had Zika.
I was like, "Holy cow, it's Zika”.
Grandfather would be so proud.
Andrew’s diagnosis, Zika, was correct.
Mystery solved.
But not much was made of their discovery of the sexual transmission.
No.
Because at this point, Zika was thought to be an obscure and mild virus.
It at least was something that we needed to be aware of, and maybe kind of keep on our
radar, that this virus could do weird things.
Yet Andrew could not be prepared for what was about to unfold.
Zika resurfaced in a tremendous outbreak.
Here in French Polynesia about 200,000 people living in that area, and more than half of
them became infected with Zika virus.
An epidemic in the Tropics—the final big “Red flag”
All of those people infected, many of them traveling by air...
The virus spread all over the South Pacific
In the fall of 2015, Zika struck hard in Brazil.
As it tore through the country, Zika revealed its darkest secret, yet.
And it was devastating...
The Zika virus appears to be a lot scarier than first thought.
All of a sudden we start getting reports of neurological problems…
...congenital infections...
...a devastating birth defect...
...babies being born with microcephaly.
“Microcephaly"
“Microcephaly”
“Microcephaly"
Microcephaly—a devastating birth defect where a baby’s brain is smaller than normal.
the result of improper neurological development.
That Zika could be responsible
seemed almost unbelievable to Andrew
at first...
Microcephaly, it can’t be causing that.
No one’s ever heard of anything like this for one of these viruses.
Most virologists remained skeptical
Until a group of Brazilian pediatricians observed the connection between Zika and these neurological
birth defects.
They led that charge that maybe Zika’s causing Microcephaly.
And it turned out they were correct.
Now everyone looked at the virus in a whole new light.
From thinking about this virus as a very mild virus—to now thinking it's one of the
most dangerous.
It was just so sad and overwhelming to see what this virus is doing to the most innocent
population: children.
You know, it was this cool, mythical virus.
It doesn't hurt anyone.
Nothing bad happens.
So a door just slammed.
the forest, and the tower...it was just kind of like, gone.
“A public health emergency of international concern...”
“Take a look at this map.
the outbreak, moving north...”
Air travelers returned to the United States infected by the virus...
Miami...
Texas, Illinois...
...Utah...
...California...
...Ohio ...and Hawaii, all showing cases.
and now we’ve seen local mosquito borne transmission.
“...Zika virus by mosquitos...”
“...Right here in the U.S.”
Dr. Weaver expanded his team’s efforts to investigate how the virus could have turned
into such a monster...
...to understand the disease process of microcephaly…
...and to search for a cure.
...developing anti-viral drugs as well as vaccines...
“...Zika virus spread through sex...”
Brian has returned to his research on sexual transmission of the virus.
The question is: How important?
How prevalent it is relative to mosquito borne transmission?
And Andrew continues to investigate the mysterious virus his grandfather discovered in Uganda
so long ago.
People are counting on all of us to get an answer quickly.
No one knows if Zika will again cause such a widespread crisis...
Yet another in a long line of viral outbreaks that seemingly emerged from nowhere.
There are probably a lot of viruses out there that aren’t being discovered because field
studies around the world have really fallen by the wayside in the last few decades.
It may be that the best path forward in preparing for future epidemics is a return to the practices
of virus hunters like Alec Haddow...
We realize today they were ahead of the game,
Scientists who searched the tropical forests of the world
in a race to find viruses, before they found us...
...and fired young imaginations, with a well-spun tale...or two.