A Genetic Insight and Overview of Zika Virus Infection: An Important Emerging Viral Infection

ABSTRACT

Zika fever is a febrile or sub-febrile illness caused by Zika virus, which mainly spreads through the bite of infected mosquitoes. Zika infection has as of late becoming an emerging infection of medical important. While clinical indications of the infection in adult cases are not serious and ailment isn't related with high death rates, Zika infection can affect foetogenesis and lead to extreme neurodevelopmental variations from the norm. For better understanding into various parts of Zika infection, this review was performed, with respect to the disease transmission, genetic and geographical distribution of Zika infection. We searched PubMed, Scopus, Embase, HINARI, AJOL, the Cochrane library, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Zika virus is a member of the family Flaviviridae, which includes dengue viruses, West Nile, and yellow fever viruses. The most common symptoms reported in confirming Zika virus infections are fever, headache, malaise, maculopapular rash, fatigue or myalgia, arthritis and arthralgia. Zika virus was first isolated from the blood of a sentinel rhesus monkey from the Zika Forest in Uganda. The virus has a wide geographical distribution, including eastern and western Africa, south and Southeast Asia, and Micronesia, where in 2007, an outbreak of Zika fever was reported on Yap Island. Numerous conventional phylogenetic analyses of Zika virus genomes reveal the presence of two main viral lineages, that is, African and Asian lineages. However, itshould be noted that phylogenetic analyses using E and NS5 genes reveal three major lineages of Zika virus with an additional lineage circulating in Africa which is designated African II lineage.