Mosquitoes Are Spreading a Rare Virus Around the World

Click to Open Overlay GalleryAedes Aegypti Mosquito Science Source/Getty Images

Brian Foy came home from a trip to Senegal to study malaria-carrying mosquitoes with a mysterious illness, and it definitely wasn’t malaria. Both Foy and his graduate student soon recovered from the rash and aching joints—“the flu is worse,” says Foy—but it wasn’t until a chance encounter with another mosquito-disease researcher that they connected the dots. That third researcher’s grandfather had helped identify a little-known African virus in the 1940s called Zika, and that’s what Foy and his student had caught. Read more.