Hello and welcome to another episode of the ThoughtWorks podcast. I'm Heather Radke, a podcast producer for ThoughtWorks.

I'm here with Dr. David Walton, who's the director for global health at ThoughtWorks, and we're going to talk about the Zika virus. Hi, David. Why don't we start by having you introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Dr. David Walton.

I am the Director of Global Health for ThoughtWorks, and I am also an instructor of

medicine at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in

Boston, Massachusetts. Okay, great. What exactly do you do for ThoughtWorks? What does it mean to be the

director of global health? As the director of global health, I lead a team, a large team of around 50 to 75 people,

thinking about how to leverage technology and software to improve healthcare,

particularly amongst those who are poor and marginalized.

So, for example, some of the people with whom we're working,

are groups with whom we're working are located in rural India or in Bangladesh,

in the mountains of Nepal, who don't have access to the technology that some of us,

say, in Boston or other places with a great variety of resources

have access to.

Got it.

Okay.

So let's talk about Zika.

What exactly is the Zika virus?

So the Zika virus is an Arbovirus.

It's been around actually for really, really long time.

It was originally discovered in 1948 in Uganda in the forests of a forest called Zika, hence the name,

and has sort of really been almost invisible in terms of our, you know, its significance until very recently.

And what happened recently?

...