in order to study they would need very large stocks of the virus. they d already developed a fast method of cultivating other viruses transmitted by mosquitoes but it had never been tried on the. first cells are taken from inside the stomach of a mosquito. those cells are then placed in a nutrient solution in which they can multiply. finally they are exposed to the virus which immediately infects the cells and multiplies exactly as it would in a live host. but would the method work with sica. we
weren t any human cases recognized until a few years later in one nine hundred fifty two and then it kind of went under the radar screen in africa or in asia. the virus was first discovered here in uganda in an area known as the zeek a forest. over the next sixty years only fourteen cases of infection were reported worldwide none of them proved serious but then in two thousand and seven an outbreak of the virus was reported on the pacific island of yeah. and in twenty thirteen in french polynesia. we were getting reports from crunch polynesia where it was before it got into brazil and it was felt that you know eighty percent of the people who were infected were very few if any symptoms so anything that was said about zucker ahead of time
infected cells were not just smaller inside they also showed the damage done by zico. as soon as the virus came into contact with the fetal brain it attacked the crucial developing nerve cells with the help of proteins on its surface the virus penetrated the cells and turned them into a virus factories as the cells it s loaded and died the. brain stopped growing causing microcephaly. the immediacy of the leaders and yours is much cleaner and does just work into baby was microcephaly when the pictures were shown of how profound the destruction of cells could occur it is chilling because you get a feeling of the destructive power of this virus.
weeks of the first of the trimester there is a big risk that the brain will not develop properly as it will be. when a baby s head is of the normal size is because the brain develops and pushes up the skull and you have the normal contour of the skull if there s anything that interferes with the destroys that process the brain doesn t develop right in the skull becomes small and. the growing number of babies with microcephaly paralleled the increase in zeek infections but was the condition actually due to the virus. panic spread among pregnant women in rio including dr patricio brazils patients. came couple seventy of them i was very worried about the pregnant women who came to the surgery were very afraid they were who wanted by the specter of microcephaly
had to pretty much every six hours or so for an entire week and watch these play two cells when we put the zinc a virus on and then finally we thought there was something so we took the sols we put them on the fly and we tried to detect wires and we found that. hinckley town and his team now had millions of zico viruses that they could experiment with the most pressing question now was what had happened in the brains of infants like little davi was the virus responsible for microcephaly. to find out professor tung needed the help of neurologists. it became clear that i needed to get ahold of some brain cells.