So we'll dig into all of that, but before we do, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and Mayo Clinic's international practice?

Absolutely.

I'll begin with just a little bit about myself, and then I'd love to tell you about Mayo Clinic's international interest and our vision and our hopes with doing the work we're doing right now.

So I'm an infectious disease doctor.

I'm based out of the Mayo Clinic based in Rochester, Minnesota, and I've been with Mayo Clinic for a little over 20 years now.

Like many of us in academic medicine, I've had the privilege of working in not just clinical medicine, but also working in education and in research.

My clinical interests have always been in HIV and transplant infectious disease, as well as tuberculosis and some of the viral hepatitis work, and those are the areas where I've had the opportunity to do some research work, and then I've been able to work in administration within Mayo's education shield as well.

How are some of the new technologies changing the field of infectious disease from your perspective?

Uh, can you give us maybe a brief summary of this one and maybe its clinical manifestations?

Absolutely.

So Zika virus is what we would call a flavivirus, which is just the family of viruses that it's in, and it's transmitted by a mosquito, in particularly is the Aedes mosquito, which is prevalent all over the United States, as well as Central America, the Caribbean, South America, some parts of Southeast Asia, and even some parts of Africa.

And when it bites a human, in the vast majority of cases, about 80% of the time, it'll cause an asymptomatic infection.

So if a person becomes infected with it and the person is young and healthy and not immunocompromised, most likely they'll never even know they had the infection.

About 20% of people may have what we consider a fairly mild infection.

So they may get some low-grade fevers.

How about a brief summary of that one?

What about the concept of chronic Lyme? Does it exist and what is it? What do we do about it?

So I'm going to give a very short answer and then I'm going to explain myself.

So you asked, does chronic Lyme exist? And in that form of the question, my answer is no.

We know that Lyme disease can cause an acute infection.

It can cause what we call a subacute infection over weeks or months, and it can cause some long-term effects if it goes untreated.

But once it is diagnosed and treated, there is no chronic form of the infection.

It doesn't linger.

Which ones do we use and how do we use them?

How do we counsel our patients?

That's a great question, Daryl.

And it's something that I think we're even more attuned to now since the whole world has been through a pandemic is And most people who didn't think about infectious diseases as often as I do are now far more aware of it, particularly viral infections.

So the recommendation we give is to first acknowledge the person's concerns, justify why they would be concerned, why they would be thinking about this, acknowledge that this can always be on somebody's mind, particularly if they hear about a new virus that's popping up or a new spread of the virus that they may have even heard of before.

But then I think it's important to very early on distinguish the difference between Ebola and the kind of viruses that can cause pandemics.

So we mentioned some of those features comparing Ebola to hantavirus.

But I think it's even more important to compare Ebola to the virus people have lived through recently, which is COVID.

How should we be preparing for this event?