Abstract
Although Zika virus (ZIKV) circulates in sub-Saharan Africa, no case of ZIKV-associated microcephaly has thus far been reported. Here, we report evidence of a possible association between a 2007 outbreak of febrile illness and an increase in microcephaly and possibly ZIKV infection in Gabon.
Since its 1947 discovery in Uganda, Zika virus (ZIKV) was restricted to sporadic human infections in Africa and Asia until 2007, when a large outbreak occurred in Micronesia, followed by another in French Polynesia 6 years later. This second outbreak spread to Brazil and throughout Central and South America, resulting in hundreds of thousands of cases (
1). ZIKV infection leads to an asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic nonspecific disease in 80% of cases, but the outbreak in the Americas and French Polynesia coincided with a steep increase in the birth of babies with congenital microcephaly (