Into Zika’s heart: Ugandan forest where virus was found

Down winding paths through dense jungles, Gerald Mukisa kicks up the dry leaves noisily with his feet to provide warning sounds, noting that the late afternoon heat is “snake time”.

It was here in the thick woodland of Zika forest, some 25 kilometres from Uganda’s capital Kampala, that the mosquito-borne Zika virus was first discovered in 1947.

The virus, linked to a surge in birth defects, is “spreading explosively”, World Health Organisation chief Margaret Chan said this week. An emergency meeting on the outbreak is due on February 1.

More than 2,100 pregnant Colombian women are infected with the virus, the country’s national health institute said on Saturday, as the disease continues its spread across the Americas.

Mukisa, who has worked to guard the forest for the past seven years, only found out about the virus that takes its name two weeks ago.

“A few people who live nearby the forest and have heard about it are getting worried,” he said. “Many others don’t know about it.”

Days ago, the tropical Zika forest was a little-known reserve visited only by bird watchers and scientists.

“Students come every week, coming from all over the world,” said Mukisa, 50, proudly showing off a guest book with signatures and comments from the US, Canada, France and Germany, among other countries.

“There are so many types of trees, and all sorts of birds.”

Uganda’s health ministry is keen to point out it has no known cases of the Zika virus, and that the current Americas’ outbreak did not originate in East Africa.

Today the forest, close to the main highway from Uganda’s international airport at Entebbe to the nearby capital Kampala, remains a research site for the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), an environmental health and protection agency founded in 1936.

Also spelt Ziika, the 12 hectare site with over 60 different types of mosquitoes, means “overgrown” in the local language, Luganda.

UVRI proudly notes that the “most prominent visitor” to Zika was former US President Jimmy Carter “who came on a bird watching tour”.

The details of the virus’ discovery, written up in a 1952 paper by Britain’s Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, described the “forested area called Zika”, where scientists were researching yellow fever among small rhesus macaque monkeys.

“This area of forest consists of a narrow, dense belt of high but broken canopy growth with clumps of large trees,” the 1952 paper read. “It lies along the edge of a long arm of Lake Victoria from which it is separated by a papyrus swamp.”