As scientists race to create a safe and effective Zika vaccine, a roadblock may await them this summer. What if there's no outbreak?
All Zika vaccines are currently in Phase I clinical trials involving a small number of participants, according to NPR. While a summertime Zika epidemic is not a welcomed prospect, without active viral outbreaks to conduct large-scale human trials, a vaccine's efficacy will be slow to prove.
"On one hand, you don't want to see outbreaks of infection," Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NPR. "But on the other hand, [without that testing] you might have to wait a long time to make sure that the vaccine works."
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The Zika virus causes several health problems, including flulike symptoms and, in rare cases, the paralysis inducing neurological disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome. The virus burst onto the international infectious disease radar during a 2015 outbreak in Brazil that ultimately infected more than 1 million people. Infections among pregnant women in Brazil resulted in the birth of thousands of babies afflicted with the neurologically debilitating birth defect microcephaly, which causes infants to be born with abnormally small heads and a host of developmental issues.
Local transmission of the virus in the United States was first identified in Florida in July 2016. It is unclear whether the virus will become endemic in the U.S.
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