The World Health Organization has declared the Zika virus outbreak an international emergency, The Associated Press reports.
Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past; people have come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary. And Zika is the newest threat, particularly to pregnant women.
New, unfamiliar and mysterious threats to our health are scary. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — where we identify, on average, one new health threat each year — we work around the clock with an approach that prioritizes finding out what we need to know as fast as we can to protect Americans.
The CDC has some of the world’s leading experts both in diseases spread by mosquitoes and in fetal abnormalities.
