People who had had dengue fever before the 2015 outbreak of Zika may have been protected from the disease, a study suggests. Pau da Lima, a slum city in the Salvador region of Brazil, was hit particularly hard by Zika. Many of the small percentages of people who remarkably dodged the virus, shared something in common: they had had a particular strain of dengue fever before. The researchers studied 1,400 people in Pau da Lima, but never expected the protective effects of dengue fever they found. In previous research on rats, previous dengue fever actually seemed to worse Zika's effects.

Source: The Star February 14, 2019 07:41 UTC