WHO declares Zika virus international emergency

The WHO warned that Zika is likely to spread explosively across almost all of the Americas with more than 20 countries, including Brazil reporting new cases daily.

A number of Zika patients in Brazil have also developed a rare autoimmune condition calledGuillain-Barré syndrome, which can cause at least temporary paralysis.

The WHO director general, Dr. Margaret Chan, described Zika as a major problem after the first meeting of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee in Geneva, Switzerland.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is set to host the 2016 Summer Olympics in August, and while Olympic organizers and global health officials are working to assess how the games will effect the spread of the virus, Chan said Monday that WHO experts “found no public health justification for restrictions on travel or trade to prevent the spread of Zika virus”.

Because of mounting evidence linking Zika infections to a birth defect, the government recommends that pregnant women consider postponing trips to places on the list. India’s poor mosquito control has made it vulnerable to outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya, which is also spread by the same aedes aegypti mosquito.

“At present, the most important protective measures against Zika virus are the control of mosquito populations, prevention of mosquito bites in at-risk individuals, especially pregnant women”.

The Pan American Health Organisation says that Zika has now spread into 24 nations and territories in the Americas.

A statement provided to The Associated Press late Monday says concrete steps will be taken beginning next week. This is just the fourth time that the WHO has declared a public health emergency since the distinction was created in 2007. An estimated 1.5 million Brazilians have caught Zika, a virus first detected in Africa in the 1947 and unknown in the Americas until it appeared in May in the poverty-stricken northeastern region of Brazil.

Currently, there is no vaccine or medication to stop Zika.

Jimmy Whitworth, an infectious diseases expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said we might soon see babies born elsewhere with malformed heads as the virus becomes entrenched in other countries.

The following States Parties provided information on a potential association between microcephaly and/or neurological disorders and Zika virus disease: Brazil, France, United States of America, and El Salvador.

Such emergency declarations are meant as an worldwide SOS signal and usually trigger increased money and efforts to halt the outbreak, as well as prompting research into possible treatments and vaccines.

The WHO is under pressure to move swiftly to tackle Zika, after admitting it was slow to respond to the recent Ebola outbreak that ravaged parts of west Africa.

Marcelo Castro, Brazil’s health minister, said the epidemic was worse than believed because in 80 per cent of the cases the infected people had no symptoms.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, has said it is planning to require people who have traveled to an affected country to defer giving blood, but details on how that might work are still being determined.