The real tragedy of all this is that right after we wrote that paper, we wrote a grant and submitted it to the National Institutes of Health to try to get funding to research this further.

Chilson Foy

Categorized in : Health News

I grabbed some traps from my lab, and set them in my yard, to see if we had mosquitoes that potentially could be the same species that might transmit an arbovirus, but this was in early September in Colorado. There wasn't really anything out.

Once a clever reporter read that paper, they kind of instantly put two and two together, and said, 'It's clear that you're either Patient One or Two, and the other one is Patient Three,' i admitted as much, and of course, after that, it kind of went crazy.

As scientists, you tend to put your work ahead of your personal safety at times, we take malaria prophylaxis. I get all the vaccines that I can possibly get.

She got worse than I did, by far, her joint pain was stronger, and it lasted a lot longer. She couldn't really open cans, and things like that, for quite a long time. And I think her symptoms of headache and aversion to light were a lot stronger than mine.

Exactly, we had just seen each other for the first time in months. You do what husbands and wives do. But later, when I'm feeling sick, I'm not having any sort of relations. I think any transmission event would have happened very soon after I got back, before I got symptoms.

I kind of feel proud about that, i think anybody who was skeptical about it, any colleagues, they were just being skeptical scientists, as they should have been. They wanted to see more evidence.

If we would have had that work ongoing, way back when, we would have had the ability to research it, to maybe even predict that sexual transmission was going to be more frequent, when a potential virus outbreak occurred, maybe we would've even been on the road to therapeutics or vaccines, but now we're kind of behind, and trying to catch up.