First Peer-Reviewed Journal Largely Devoted to Zika Virus Research

David A. Schwartz, MD, MS Hyg, FCAP, clinical professor of Pathology at the Medical College of Georgia, explains how researchers from all over the world have come together to share their research on Zika virus.

Interview Transcript (modified slightly for readability):

“This outbreak, this pandemic, in my experience, has been very unusual because investigators all over the world, like at this meeting, have been in very close collaboration with one another. We’ve been sharing results freely; we’ve even been sharing unpublished results, which is a fairly new phenomenon in my experience. And, of course, I’m an editor of medical journals, and the medical journals have been doing everything they can to rapidly publish the results of investigators, like myself and my colleagues, and to make them available largely free of charge on the internet. For instance, some of the data that I’m talking with you about today, and data from my colleagues and people who I am very familiar with, recently published their work in this journal—this is the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. That’s published by the College of American Pathologists, and this is actually the first peer-reviewed journal that is largely devoted to the subject of the Zika virus. I happened to have edited this issue. These articles were published very quickly after they were submitted to me as the editor. We’re trying to get this information out to investigators around the world as quickly as possible so that it helps them design further studies to understand the Zika virus.

My co-investigators and I published our placental pathology research in [this issue of Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine]. I’m from Atlanta, and my colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control published an article in here also looking at placental pathology, and, in fact, we found the same results; we confirmed each other’s results independently. We have, in this issue, some physicians who are very in the leadership of the blood bank system in the United States, who are talking about the effects of Zika virus on the blood supply in terms of transfusion and organ donation. We have people in here talking about the microbiology of Zika virus, from Yale University. We have authors who are talking about the biology of Zika virus as a representative of the group that it belongs to, called the flaviviruses. We have people talking about the role of pathologists and medical examiners in identifying outbreaks like Zika virus. We have authors from Europe who are describing the findings in fetuses, in stillborn infants, and the pathology in the brain of Zika virus. It’s really an amazing group of people who have contributed to this; I’m very proud of this.”