The Rise of Zika Virus (ZIKV)

If you have been following the news lately like the rest of the world, you should know by now about the spread of Zika Virus (ZIKV).

 

Zika virus is spread to people through mosquito bites. The most common symptoms of Zika virus disease are fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis (red eyes). The illness is usually mild with symptoms lasting from several days to a week. CDC – http://www.cdc.gov/zika/

 

As part of MULTIVAC Platform at ISCPIF, I wanted to see if it is possible to spot “Zika Virus” in our datasets by using Multivac dashboards.

Web of Science

As it can be seen, there is not much in Web of Science especially since it is not being updated in realtime compare to other datasets. However, the statistics from top countries and top institutions are still interesting.

 

PubMed (DB: Medline)

Let’s take a look at some of Mosquito-borne diseases in our PubMed (Medline) dataset:

 

 

 

 

And this is for Ebola outbreak started 2014:

 

And now some associated keywords with Zika Virus:

 

News over Twitter

Since 30 days ago, the number of tweets that mentioning “Zika Virus” have been increasing.

 

 

 

Wikipedia

As it shown in this figure, the attention towards Ebola virus is steady and at the opposite side the attention towards Zika Virus is on its rise. These two are the recent outbreaks not to mention they are very different (source: http://qz.com/608607/its-wrong-to-compare-zika-to-ebola/)

 

 

Few points:

1. The last two datasets (Twitter and Wikipedia) prove the importance of real-time and updated data and its crucial role in early discovery and exploration stage.
2. The relation between Climate Change and Infectious Diseases such as malaria, dengue and Zika virus would be also the focus of this report in future.
3. This article will be developing by further discoveries.

 

Useful links:

One our ISCPIF partners “Institut Pasteur” has published the first complete genome sequence of the Zika virus

http://www.pasteur.fr/en/institut-pasteur/press/press-documents/institut-pasteur-french-guiana-publishes-first-complete-genome-sequence-zika-virus-circulating-americas

 

CNN: Five things you need to know about Zika

 

Zika in Europe: Man in Denmark tests positive for mosquito-borne virus following return from South and Central America