Indian healthcare system should be equipped
As the Zika virus, for which there is no vaccine yet, spreads across South and Central America, with cases being reported across 20 countries, India needs to be alert to an outbreak here. This is because India has warm tropical weather and is home to the Aedes Aegypti mosquito which carries the Zika virus. Notably, the same mosquito also carries the virus for dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever — which claim many hundred lives every year in India. In fact, the diseases even have the same kind of symptoms such as fever, head and body aches and nausea. It’s good that the Union Government is already looking into the matter.
Minister for Health and Family Welfare JP Nadda held an emergency meeting on Friday, and is also coordinating with the External Affairs Ministry so that travellers to and from the affected countries can be properly screened. Globally, the World Health Organisation also held a meeting last week and is deliberating whether to declare the outbreak an international health emergency. However, the problem that everyone faces is that very little is known about the virus, at least in its current explosive avatar. The virus was identified in 1947 in rhesus monkeys in Uganda, and found in humans for the first time in 1952 in Uganda and Tanzania. Around the same time, the virus was also detected in six Indian States, though there was no outbreak.
Also, in the early years, the symptoms were mild; it wasn't until recently that the virus was reported to cause serious damage. In 2013-2014, French Polynesia saw an unusual increase in the Guillain-Barre syndrome, wherein the body's immune system attacks the nervous system, which was linked to the Zika virus. In April 2015, Brazil had its first baby with microcephaly, born to an infected mother. Since then, there have been 270 cases of microcephaly and another 3,448 cases are being investigated.
Microcephaly results in the child being born with an abnormally small head, leading to serious developmental issues. Doctors are yet to find a definitive link between either syndrome and the Zika virus. However, the circumstantial evidence is serious enough for global concern. In Brazil, the Government has all but asked women to not get pregnant until the matter is resolved, especially since many infected women do not even know that they are carrying the virus until it is too late. However, controlling pregnancies is difficult, as neither contraception nor abortion is an easily available option or even legal for most women in the region.
Making matters worse is the fact that not only is there no vaccine available to protect against Zika, no country or pharmaceutical company is even close to developing one. Different agencies are now rushing to come up with a solution but it will still take several months, if not years, before a vaccine can be made available for large-scale use. The world faced a similar problem with Ebola, and unfortunately, the lessons from that crisis have not been learnt. Pharmaceutical companies are still not interested in developing vaccines for diseases such as Zika, dengue or chikungunya, which mostly affect the world's poorer populations, even as they focus their R&D efforts on potential cash cows like a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's. This must change. Perhaps India can show the way.