I stood at the front desk of a major Washington, DC, hospital last month. I had a head-to-toe rash that developed after I’d returned from the Dominican Republic, where Zika is much more common than it is stateside. The friend I’d traveled with was showing symptoms of the virus. I’d come to the emergency room to find out if I had it too.
This was not a question I wanted to hear from the man who was checking me in.
But ignorance of what Zika is, and uncertainty about how to deal with it, was common in my quest to get diagnosed — even from parts of the medical community that I expected would know what to do.
I found out a week after my trip to the ER that I had one of DC’s first 10 confirmed cases of the virus. Fortunately,
