Right so Zika as an infection is a
pretty limited infection.  You can, you can
get a rash, you can get a headache,  joint
pain but the symptoms are pretty mild.
And in fact a majority of women or
majority of people with Zika won't have
any symptoms at all so they don't even
know that they had Zika.  Zika first came
to light because people who had been
infected with Zika were later found to
give birth to children with microcephaly.
Now microcephaly is when the baby's head
is smaller than you would anticipate and
then it started to become realized that
in fact seek is more than just
microcephaly.  Zika can impact many
different aspects of the developing
fetus not just the brain where you can
also get other things such as:
calcifications within the baby's brain
hydrocephalus which is a buildup of
water in the in the head, the cerebral
spinal fluid, you can have absence of
structures or abnormal structures and
you can have impacts on the fetal eyes
on the hearing of the baby, as well as
impact on the growth where you can have
a smaller baby.  So it's it's a situation
where Zika affects many different
aspects of the developing fetus.  And
importantly studies have also come out
to show that a fetus a baby who's born
and can appear normal at birth and have
a normal-sized head may still be
impacted.  There's a condition called
acquired microcephaly which was
identified when the baby was six or
eight months of age and the baby had a
normal head size at birth but it was
microcephalic later on.
So understanding the impact of Zika is
is critical for us to follow the entire
baby and not just those babies who have
small heads or something that appears
abnormal at birth.
