The year was 1947. Scientists had isolated a virus from a pyrexial rhesus monkey in Uganda and named it after the forest where the monkey lived — Zika. Then, a little more than a year ago, in the fall of 2015, health officials in Brazil reported a sharp increase in the number of cases of exceptionally small brains (microcephaly) in human newborns. These cases were connected to infections with the Zika virus. So what happened during that 70-year gap, and why did most of us feel so blindsided by Zika? A rhesus monkey. Several reasons can help account for those years, including recent findings by Dr. Daniel Janies and a team of researchers from the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics at UNC Charlotte, Atheric Pharmaceutical, and ioGenetics, to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Cladistics. Don’t Miss: First Full Genome Analysis Solves the Mystery of How Zika Got So DangerousLet’s Start at the BeginningAfter the 1947 discovery of Zika in Africa, the virus moved through…more