A Zika vaccine could be 10 years away

The rapid spread of the Zika virus has public health officials worried, not least because so little is known about the mosquito-borne illness. In most children and adults, the symptoms are mild, if they appear at all, but there is a speculative link to the nervous system disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome and a more solid and troubling tie to microcephaly, a condition where babies are born with small heads and shrunken brains. There is no vaccine and no treatment, but researchers in Texas and Brazil are working on a Zika vaccine. It will probably be 5-12 years before they have one ready for the public.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston tell BBC News they could have a working vaccine in a year or two, but that getting regulatory approval to use it on humans could take another eight to 10 years. Prof. Nikos Vasilakis says that 20-30 million Americans in the Southern U.S. are at risk of infection if the virus spreads north of Mexico, as expected. But there's a debate over how dangerous the virus really is.

Several countries with significant infections — El Salvador, Colombia, and Brazil — are urging women to put off having children, given the risk of bearing children with microcephaly. But the spike in microcephaly cases in Brazil doesn't seem to be as big as originally thought, and the World Health Organization stresses that a link between the Zika virus and microcephaly is circumstantial and unproven. In 2014, Brazil had 150 reported cases of microcephaly a year (versus some 2,500 cases of microcephaly a year in the U.S.), so the 4,180 suspected cases reported since October shocked the country. But on Wednesday, Brazilian health officials said that of the 732 cases they examined more closely, 270 were confirmed to be microcephaly and 462 cases were actually something else.

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Still, "I don't think we should lower our alarm over the Zika outbreak," Paul Roepe, co-director of Georgetown University's Center for Infectious Disease, tells The Associated Press. And two public health experts, Dr. Daniel Lucey and Lawrence Gostin, warned in the Journal of the American Medical Association that if the WHO doesn't act, it risks a repeat of the Ebola disaster in Africa. See more about Zika in the BBC News explainer video below. Peter Weber