Zika Virus Informative Speech

Many of us enjoy the outdoors and spending time with our families. It’s a nice day out you invite your friends over and start up the grill while the kids are at play in the yard. You enjoy some good food and company, that night you go in and realize you are covered in bites and so are your children. If your kids are anything like mine the bites swell up to the size of a half dollar. We all know it’s those pesky mosquitoes. But what many of us don’t think about is the disease that those tiny flying insects cause. We’ve all heard of West Nile, malaria, yellow fever and a few others that they carry, but the Zika virus is something new. The Zika Virus was first discovered in Uganda’s Zika forest in 1947 however; many of us have never heard of it until recently. Many of us are still unsure about the

II. The symptoms may seem minuscule compared to the possible effects of this virus.

a. Some people infected show no symptoms, when others do.

1. Some symptoms attributed to the virus are conjunctivitis (pink eye), eye pain, headache, itching, joint pain, low-grade fever, and rash.

2. If infected the infection is likely to only last several days to a week.

b. (GBS) Guillain-Barre’ Syndrome is and uncommon sickness of the nervous system in which a person’s own immune system damage the nerve cells, causing muscle weakness, and sometimes paralysis ("Zika and Guillain-Barré Syndrome." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention., 14 Apr. 2016).

1. GBS is believed to be triggered by Zika in a small amount of infections. The CDC is investigating the link between zika and GBS.

c. The greatest concern with zika is Microcephaly.

1. Microcephaly is a birth defect where a baby’s head is smaller than that of a normal sized infants head. The severity can range from minimal to severally smaller. Because babies with microcephaly often have smaller brains that aren’t developed