How Scottish scientist was first to find Zika virus... 70 years ago

ITS name now casts fear into the heart of overseas travellers, having spread to more than 50 countries.

The Zika virus, which has been linked to frightening birth defects in the babies of pregnant women who have it, is predicted to affect millions.

But almost 70 years ago when a Scots scientist discovered the virus in a Ugandan forest, he didn’t think it was much to worry about.

Professor Alexander Haddow was one of the team to first isolate the Zika virus from mosquitoes in Africa, and his papers have now been uncovered in the archive of the University of Glasgow.

The incredible haul includes handwritten documents and shows how he set up home in ‘Haddow’s tower’, a manmade structure deep in the forest, to capture mosquito data, after finding the virus within the body of a rhesus monkey.

The scientist never realised, working in the 1940s and 1950s, how headlinegrabbing the virus he discovered would become.

Eleanor Tiplady, the PhD student who is working through the archive, revealed: ‘It’s been particularly interesting to read work on Zika – which he doesn’t view as a particular threat at that time. We have

‘Amazed by volume of material’

been amazed by the calibre and volume of material we have found in the Haddow archive.

‘That could prove very, very useful to current researchers.’

Zika is named after its birthplace, the Zika forest where Professor Haddow worked, around seven miles from the central Ugandan town of Entebbe.

In 1947, he was among a team conducting routine surveillance for yellow fever when they isolated the Zika virus from a captive sentinel rhesus monkey.

His archive also includes handwritten notes and statistics, detailing the first ever catch of mosquitoes carrying the virus. The insect carriers were captured on a tree platform in the forest in 1948.

The papers will be the basis of a panel discussion during the Glasgow Science Festival, called ‘Zika Virus: Present, Past & Future’, on June 15.

It comes as the University of Glasgow continues to undertake significant research into the Zika outbreak, including working on vaccines and examining the links between Zika and Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Zika has been reported in more than 50 countries, mostly in the Americas and the Pacific, and 1.5million people have been infected in Brazil, where the outbreak began.

Most have no symptoms but it has been linked to birth defects including microcephaly, which causes a baby to be born with an abnormally small head and developmental problems.

Professor Haddow died in 1978.