KALYANVARMA, WIKIMEDIA
The devastating developmental damage that Zika infection can cause when children are infected in the womb is abundantly clear. But a big question has remained: what about babies infected shortly after birth? To gain some insight, researchers infected infant rhesus macaques with Zika virus after they were born, and observed that monkeys have abnormal brain development and display atypical behavior at six months of age. The research is published today (April 4) in Science Translational Medicine.
The study “is the first of its kind to really show how pathogenic Zika can be in infants, even when infants are postnatally infected,” says Dan Barouch, a virologist at Harvard Medical School who was not part of the study. “There’s certainly correlative clinical data that would make us ...
