Experts admit they know little about Zika virus as they gather to trade notes

WASHINGTON – Federal and international health officials confessed Tuesday to an encyclopedic list of unanswered questions about the fast-spreading Zika virus, which in a matter of months has become an international public health crisis.

In a bleak assessment of their ability to confront the disease, epidemiologists, public health experts, scientists and researchers – one by one – told a conference on Zika of their concerns that too little was known about diagnosing the disease and about how it might be spread.

Among the unknowns: what animals other than humans can be infected with the Zika virus, how often it has been spread by sexual contact, and whether it is the cause of birth defects and other neurological disorders, as suspected.

Scientists don’t know the role that climate change may have had in Zika’s rapid spread through the Americas. They don’t know whether the virus has changed in some way that makes it more dangerous for humans.

“We don’t, at a very basic level, know whether the virus has mutated and that is a cause of the explosive epidemic potential,” said Ronald Rosenberg, acting director for the Division of Vector-Borne Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At the request of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the leading scientists and researchers met at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington to identify research priorities and try to hammer out a strategy for a response should an outbreak occur in the United States.

Researchers pressed health officials and world leaders to take more action, coordinate investigations and provide data that can be used to fight the virus.

Marcos Espinal, director of the Department of Communicable Disease and Health Analysis at the Pan American Health Organization, said it might be months before researchers had determined for certain one of the main public concerns – whether Zika is linked to microcephaly, a birth defect that causes newborns to have small heads and other neurological disorders. But for now, he said, all indications are that there is a connection.

Victor Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine, called the Zika virus a “wake-up call” and pressed world leaders to stop thinking of the epidemic as strictly a health issue.

The potential economic losses from a pandemic could amount to $60 billion a year, he said.

“It’s more than just health,” Dzau said in an interview. “Airports get shut down. Borders get shut down. People stop traveling.”

More than 30 countries and territories across the Americas have reported local transmissions of the Zika virus since it was first discovered in Brazil last May. There have been 52 U.S. cases in 16 states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. At least 21 cases have been discovered in Florida, the most in any state, including seven in Miami-Dade and four in Broward County.