Nearly 30 years ago, Brian Noack and Brian Howell were teammates on the college baseball team at Pensacola Junior College.

Driving through many parts of Escambia County, you might have noticed billboards with advertisements of a different kind. As part of an ongoing HIV awareness campaign, the Florida Department of Health has been putting up these large ads, urging citizens to get tested. Because of elevated numbers for HIV/AIDS cases in the county, the continuance of this and other public awareness campaigns have unfortunately been necessary in recent years.

Zika virus, a viral relative of yellow fever, West Nile and dengue fever, was first classified in 1947 within rhesus monkeys in Uganda. Named after the forest in which it was first discovered, in 1952, this virus was first observed in humans.  According to a 2015 article in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases by researchers from the University of Bahia (Brazil), outbreaks of Zika are not a new scenario for many parts of the world. In fact, over the course of 2007-2014, multiple outbreaks were known to have occurred in countries across the Asian-Pacific and Western Hemisphere. In February of 2016 however, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an international public health emergency. According to a statement by the WHO, Zika is spreading “explosively.” In the same statement, the WHO expressed that the level of concern over this public health emergency is “extremely high.” Since 2007, a total of 61 countries have reported transmission of the virus. During the next 12 months, the World Health Organization estimates that millions more cases will arise within the Americas.