“Our partnership with Notre Dame and Mayo Clinic is making Belize a safer place to visit and a safer place to live.”
At Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health, researchers Nicole Achee and John Grieco study Aedes aegypti and its role in mosquito-borne diseases. Over the past 20 years, the biology professors’ work has taken them around the globe to Indonesia, Peru, Suriname, Thailand, Uganda and Belize and has advanced understanding of how mosquitoes and other insects spread infectious diseases and led to better strategies to curtail disease outbreaks.
Once Zika was identified in Belize, officials at the Ministry of Health contacted Achee and Grieco for assistance in tracking and slowing the outbreak. Grieco explains that part of the problem with diseases like Zika is that the symptoms are often non-specific including headache, fever and rash. Aedes mosquitoes transmit Zika virus and other related viruses from an infected person to an uninfected one through a bite, and Aedes aegypti can bite several people and quickly spread Zika through a community. Although no antiviral treatment for Zika currently is available, if cases of Zika are diagnosed early, patients and families can be appropriately counseled and the areas of contraction can be quickly treated to reduce the disease-carrying mosquito populations and prevent subsequent disease outbreaks.
This work was highlighted in NBC's 'What would you fight for? ' commercial.