The fight against the Zika virus continues to be a global effort. In Maryland, four local public health research teams received the funding they need to put their ideas to work.
The Johns Hopkins University teams, which incudes three from Bloomberg School of Public Health, were awarded grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Combating Zika and Future Threats Grand Challenge, the agency announced Wednesday.
Out of 21 recipients, the teams will be award some of the $15 million in grants handed out to researchers across the globe for their groundbreaking ideas.
USAID reports it received nearly 900 submissions for the challenge in just nine weeks. No other institution in the challenge received more than 2 awards.
The Zika Virus has been liked to brain-related birth defeats in newborns of mothers who contracted the virus during pregnancy. Most cases of the mosquito-borne illness have been discovered in Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico and other parts of the Americas. Recently, more than a dozen cases of domestic transmission were reported in a small section of Miami, Fla.
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