Zika virus congenital syndrome: experimental models and clinical aspects

 

Carolina Manganeli Polonio¹, Carla Longo de Freitas¹, Nagela Ghabdan Zanluqui¹, Jean Pierre Schatzmann Peron¹

 

1 Neuroimmune Interactions Laboratory, Immunology Department – ICB IV, University of São Paulo (USP), Av. Prof. Lineu Prestes, 1730, Cidade Universitária, São Paulo, SP CEP 05508-900, Brazil

 

ABSTRACT

 

Viral infections have long been the cause of severe diseases to humans, increasing morbidity and mortality rates worldwide, either in rich or poor countries. Yellow fever virus, H1N1 virus, HIV, dengue virus, hepatitis B and C are well known threats to human health, being responsible for many million deaths annually, associated to a huge economic and social cost. In this context, a recently introduced flavivirus in South America, called Zika virus (ZIKV), led the WHO to declare in February 1st 2016 a warning on Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). ZIKV is an arbovirus of the Flaviviridae family firstly isolated from sentinels Rhesus sp. monkeys at the Ziika forest in Uganda, Africa, in 1947. Lately, the virus has well adapted to the worldwide spread Aedes aegypti mosquito, the vector for DENV, CHIKV, YFV and many others. At first, it was not considered a threat to human health, but everything changed when a skyrocketing number of babies born with microcephaly and adults with Guillain-Barré syndrome were reported, mainly in northeastern Brazil. It is now well established that the virus is responsible for the so called congenital Zika syndrome (CZS), whose most dramatic features are microcephaly, arthrogryposis and ocular damage. Thus, in this review, we provide a brief discussion of these main clinical aspects of the CZS, correlating them with the experimental animal models described so far.

 

Key words: Zika virus; Congenital infection; Arthrogryposis; Ocular abnormality; Experimental models

 

Funding

This work was supported by FAPESP process no. 2011/18703–2.

 

Published online: 15 September 2017.

 

Received: March 10, 2017.

Accepted: September 1, 2017.

 

Correspondence: jeanpierre@usp.br

 

Author's contributions

CMP delineated the topics and wrote introduction and microcephaly; CLF wrote about ocular alterations; NGZ wrote about arthrogryposis; and JPSP coordinated and corrected the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version.

 

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

 

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