Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City has so far recorded 145 Zika virus infections in 23 of its 24 districts.
At least 19 pregnant women were among the victims, the municipal Preventive Medicine Centre said on Thursday.
It noted that among four new cases of infections was a local pregnant woman.
“Relevant agencies in the city are urging residents to kill mosquitoes and their larvae, use mosquito nets when sleeping, and minimise travel to affected areas,’’ it stressed.
Vietnam has reported 93 Zika infection cases in nine localities nationwide so far this year, Tran Dac Phu, the Head of the General Department of Preventive Medicine under Vietnam’s Ministry of Health (MoH) said on Monday.
He said “most Zika infections are found in southern Vietnam, and the disease has developed into a massive outbreak.
“Among those infected cases in Vietnam was a four-month-old kid suffering from microcephaly, with possible link to Zika virus was recorded,’’ Phu said.
Phu said in case Zika cases rise in the coming time, the MoH has built a plan to respond to the disease in three scenarios of no infiltration, penetration but scattering and outbreak
“Updates on the situation and warns have been continuously provided to local people,’’ Phu said.
According to Phu, the current target is to minimise the spreading of Zika virus in the community and prevent Zika infection among pregnant women.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Friday said there have been no confirmed cases of Zika among travellers or athletes at the Rio Olympics.
The WHO said its prediction that the Games would not fuel the spread of the Zika virus was being proved correct.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that some health experts had criticised the organisation for not calling for the Games to be moved or postponed.
However, a research warning that two billion people could be at risk of Zika in Africa and Asia has been published.
At a news conference in Geneva, the head of WHO’s health emergency programme, Peter Salama, said: “We don’t have any confirmed cases of Zika amongst travellers or amongst indeed athletes.’’
And he said of the Paralympics, due to start on Sept. 7: “We are optimistic that the same risk assessment will hold and there will be little additional risks.’’
WHO says Zika remains a global public health emergency.
It had advised pregnant women to avoid travelling to the Games, and visitors to take precautions to avoid mosquito bites, because Zika has been linked to birth defects.
But in spite of the concern voiced by some scientists, WHO had said mosquito activity was relatively low in Brazil in August.
The top four golfers in the world, including Rory McIlroy, also pulled out of the Games because of fears over the virus.
The Zika outbreak began in Brazil a year ago, but now more than 60 countries and territories have continuing transmission including, most recently, Singapore.
More than 1,400 cases of microcephaly in babies have been linked to Zika in Brazil.
The babies were born with abnormally small heads, a condition threatening their brain development.
The virus has also been linked to a rare nervous system disorder, Guillain-Barre syndrome.
The Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) on Friday said the sixth case of Zika virus infection in South Korea has been found in a 28-year-old woman who recently came back from Dominica.
According to the KCDC, the woman, who had stayed in the Central American country from June 2014, came back to South Korea on June 23 via the U.S. and China’s Taiwan.
She was confirmed positive with the mosquito-borne virus on Thursday after developing a rash, and joint and muscle pains from Monday.
It marked the sixth case of the country’s Zika virus infection since the fifth one was detected some 50 days ago.
Among the total, one came from Brazil, one from Vietnam, one from Dominica and three from the Philippines.
The KCDC said the sixth patient was not pregnant, noting that it has been conducting an in-depth epidemiological investigation.
Zika is a virus that is primarily spread by mosquito bites, particularly risky for pregnant women as it is thought to be linked to a rare birth defect – microcephaly that causes newborn babies to have unusually small heads and damaged brains.
The Zika virus is believed not to be spread by ordinary touches between humans, but it can be transmitted through sex and blood transfusion.Cases of sexual transmission from travelers to their sexual partners had been reported from the U.S. and Europe.
The KCDC has advised pregnant women not to travel to Zika-infected countries, while recommending fertile women delay pregnancy for at least two months after returning from such nations.
Zika was first found in Africa and spread to Asia and Latin America.
Ahead of the Brazil Summer Olympics, the World Health Organisation declared the Zika virus outbreak as a global emergency.
President Barack Obama has criticised the United States Congress for failing to back his request for a $1.9bn (£1.25bn) fund to combat the spreading Zika virus.
He warned that the country could face “bigger problems” in the future.
His comments came as the latest figures showed that there were nearly 300 pregnant women in the U.S who had tested positive for Zika, the BBC reports.
The virus is thought to cause serious birth defects. It is spread through mosquitoes and sexual contact.
The World Health Organization has declared the Zika virus a global public health emergency.
It can cause microcephaly, a birth defect, marked by a small head size and can lead to developmental problems in infants.
There have been around 1,300 confirmed cases of microcephaly in Brazil, with thousands more under investigation.
Symptoms of Zika virus include mild fever, conjunctivitis, headache, joint pain and rashes.
On Friday, President Obama said the Senate had agreed to only half of the required funding, and the House of Representatives only a third.
He said that even this money ($589m) had been diverted from funds earmarked to tackle the threat of Ebola.
The Korea Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) on Friday said the third case of the Zika virus was detected in South Korea from a man having traveled to the Philippines.
The 21-year-old man, who had made a trip to the Southeast Asian country for five days through April 14, tested positive for the mosquito-borne virus.
The virus was detected from his saliva and urine, but he did not show any symptoms of the virus such as rash and muscle pain.
According to the KCDC, he was not classified as a confirmed patient.
The man’s 20-year-old brother, the second Zika case who had traveled to the Philippines together with the man, was classified as a confirmed patient on Wednesday.
The younger brother developed symptoms of flu from April 20 and started to show rash in his body on April 22.
He was discharged from a hospital on Thursday as he recovered from the viral disease.
The first South Korean Zika case was found from a 43-year-old man on March 22.
Zika is a virus that is primarily spread by mosquito bites.
The bite is particularly risky for pregnant women as it is thought to be linked to a rare birth defect – microcephaly that causes newborn babies to have unusually small heads and damaged brains.
The Zika virus is believed not to be spread by ordinary touches between humans, but it can be transmitted through sex and blood transfusion.
Cases of sexual transmission from travelers to their sexual partners had been reported from the U.S. and Europe.
The KCDC advised pregnant women not to travel to Zika-infected countries, while recommending fertile women delay pregnancy for at least two months after returning from those countries.
Zika was first found in Africa and spread to Asia and Lain America.
The virus is spreading rapidly in Latin America, while Thailand and the Philippines are the most Zika-infected countries in Asia.
The Nigeria Police Force has donated over 600 Insecticide Treated Nets and drugs worth millions of naira to the Police Secondary School, Akpabuyo Local Government Area of Cross River State to help protect the students and staff from mosquito bites and prevent the spread of malaria, zika and other diseases caused by mosquitoes.
The nets and malaria drugs were presented to the School Management on behalf of the Police Authority in Akpabuyo by the Commissioner in Charge of Police Medical Services, CP Wilson Akwiwu in the presence of the Commandant, Police Secondary School, Superintendent of Police Peter Austin and the Officer in charge of the Police Medical Clinic in the School, Inspector Baba Enoch, as well as other management staff of the School.
Commissioner Akwiwu said the donation was part of the Inspector General of Police’s commitment to support healthy living within Police formations across the country.
He said the human body can only function properly in a healthy environment and urged the students to maintain good hygiene in order to be healthy to pursue their studies diligently and compete favourably with their counterparts in Lagos and Abuja.
The Police Medical Services Commissioner pointed out that the Police Secondary School, Akpabuyo was specially selected as one of the beneficiaries of the program because it is the only Police school with a Medical Centre in the country.
He emphasized that malaria is a killer disease that has affected many families in Nigeria and called on the beneficiaries to judiciously use the drugs and the insecticide treated nets to achieve desired results.
He lauded the staff and students of the school for their high level of discipline and commitment to work, assuring that their problems, including inadequate accommodation, expansion of the school Medical Clinic to meet increasing health needs, would be taken to Abuja for possible positive response from the Inspector General of Police.
Commandant of the Police Secondary School, Akpabuyo, Superintendent of Police Peter Austin, thanked the Commissioner for the gesture, assuring that the drugs and Insecticide Treated Mosquito Nets would be properly put to use by the students.
Mr. Austin appealed to the Police high command to look into the challenges facing the school especially accommodation and expansion as well as improvement of facilities in the School Medical Clinic to meet increasing health needs of the people.
The Officer in charge of the School Medical Clinic, Inspector Baba Enoch, also praised the efforts of the Commissioner in tackling their health needs, noting that the Clinic requires expansion and well equipped facilities in order to meet growing health challenges of the student.
Enoch said the items donated would help a great deal in checkmating the spread of malaria, zika and other Mosquito causing Diseases in the school and its environs.
•Now is the time for Nigeria to prepare for a possible outbreak
As if the onslaught of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) and Lassa fever were not enough, Nigeria must now gear up for a possible encounter with Zika virus, the mosquito-borne viral ailment that has been linked with birth defects in babies born to infected mothers.
Although it was first discovered in the Zika forest of Uganda in 1947, the disease has spread to the Caribbean, Central and South America, and is carried by the hardy Aedes mosquito. An outbreak of Zika virus in Brazil in May 2015 is believed to have caused about 3,500 birth defects even after the disappearance of its symptoms in the mothers.
Such is the alarm caused by the explosive spread of the disease that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared Zika virus a global health emergency requiring coordinated health responses, the expedited development of diagnostic testing procedures and vaccines, as well as enhanced control of the mosquitoes which carry it.
Apart from the general lack of immunity in humans, perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the Zika virus epidemic is the ease of its spread. Like malaria, the disease is spread by infected mosquitoes which thrive in dirty and humid environments. While its effects in adults – fever, aches and pain, rashes, red eyes – are relatively mild, there is growing concern that pregnant women infected by the disease may give birth to babies with microcephaly, having unusually small heads and damaged brains. Some four million people could be infected by the end of 2016.
Nigeria is no stranger to the depredations of mosquito-borne diseases. The country loses 300,000 victims to malaria every year, more than any other nation. There was an outbreak of yellow fever in 2000, and dengue fever in April 2014. The endemic nature of these diseases is a testimony to the failure of the strategies designed to control them.
The country simply cannot afford the spread of yet another highly-infectious, insect-borne disease at a time that it is still struggling to overcome those it is already familiar with. The lack of knowledge about the Zika virus, the absence of reliable diagnostic procedures, treatment regimens and vaccines further complicates the dilemma.
Prevention must therefore be the main plank in any viable Nigerian response to the disease. In attaining this aim, properly utilising the lessons of the country’s successful handling of the EVD outbreak in July 2014 is crucial. All states must have emergency response centres capable of identifying, locating, tracking and isolating the disease in their areas of responsibility. Comprehensive information campaigns must be developed to enlighten the populace about the ways in which the disease can be prevented, how its symptoms can be recognised, and what actions to take if it is discovered.
Most crucially, the anti-Zika virus campaign should be used to reinvigorate the strategies that have long been deployed against malaria: the maintenance of clean environments free of wild vegetation and standing water; regular and thorough sanitary inspections; improved water supply; comprehensive primary medical care; the provision of adequate nutrition for babies and children.
Close coordination with other countries and international health bodies and non-government organisations (NGOs) is crucial. Nigerians are famously peripatetic; thousands of them live in Brazil, the epicenter of Zika virus. Procedures must be developed to ensure that the health status of those who travel to Zika-prone areas is carefully monitored.
Ultimately, however, Nigeria must begin to develop a much more comprehensive response to public health emergencies which runs the gamut of preventive and treatment strategies. Upgrading sanitation, medical, research and civic education institutions and facilities will enable the country to react to threats like Zika virus with greater effectiveness and efficiency.
A new type of terror, in the shape of a virus, has been abroad in the past few months. Day by day, it gets bigger in the public eye. Public Health authorities all over the world are worried.
The epicenter of the crisis is Brazil, host of the Rio Carnival, and host of the Olympics in a few short months.
Africans, long stigmatized,and bearing a vague sense of guiltfor rare infections that have originated from the continent to ravage the world, may be excused for heaving a sigh of relief. At least this one is in South America. Nothing to do with us – thank God!
Unfortunately, the celebration, such as it is, is very short. For the antecedents of Zika are – yes – sadly, in Africa.
In 1947, in Zika forest, in Uganda, a rhesus monkey came down with a febrile illness. A hitherto unknown virus belonging to the group of arboviruses was identified as the cause of the illness. It was named the Zika virus, after the forest.
A year later, the virus was detected in the mosquito AedesAfricanus.
There are reports that the virus was found over the next twenty years to be endemic in some parts of Africa, including Nigeria and Senegal, but not really posing a significant health risk to the human population.
In 2012, two French scientists became infected with Zika while working in Senegal. Here the story gets very interesting indeed. Neither of the scientists was seriously ill. However, after one of them returned to his home country, where there were no mosquitoes to serve as vector, his wife became ill with the same illness. The children of the couple did not catch the fever. This meant the only way the scientist’s wife could have caught the infection was through sexual transmission.
This was totally ‘out of the box’. A mosquito-borne viral infection was also manifesting as a Sexually Transmitted Infection.
At this point, it was a medical curiousity – a unique ‘crossover’ infection, but hardly more than that.
The story was about to get more scary.
From 2013, an epidemic of Zika virus infection was noticed in French Polynesia and the Pacific Islands. These included popular tourist destinations such as Tahiti and Bora Bora, where up to 20,000 people were afflicted. Some of the affected persons developed a syndrome similar toGuillaineBarre syndrome – a condition in which there is unexplained paralysis of the body’s muscles. Some of their babies were also born with neurological birth defects.
The alarm bells began to ring. It would soon get worse – much worse.
In 2015 Brazilian health authorities observed that there was a massive increase in the numbers of babies born with microcephaly in certain parts of the country. This is a condition in which the head is abnormally small, and the growth and development of the brain is impaired. Many children with the condition have severe intellectual impairment and neurological problems, and some do not survive beyond a few years. In most of these cases, the baby’s mother had suffered from Zika infection during the pregnancy.
The first few cases where this connection was clearly made occurred in May 2015. The evidence was difficult to doubt. In a typical year, about 200 babies are born with microcephaly in the whole nation. Since October 2015, more than 4000 babies have been born with the condition.
A similar pattern of affliction has been observed in some other countries in Latin America. These include Columbia, El Salvador, and Panama.
It is not difficult to understand the sense of fear, even panic, occasioned by the mystery and mystique of Zika. It is physical illness behaving like a Curse, skipping lightly over the patient herself and visiting its worst ravages on the next generation. The ‘sins’ of parents are being visited on their offspring. Most of the afflicted are poor people living in mean circumstances, living on the hope of a better tomorrow. The emblem of that hope is the child of their loins. Zika destroys that hope, and leaves them with the brain-damaged shell who will have to be looked after all of his short and miserable life. At the level of Psychology, there is no greater violation of the human being than the elimination of his hope for the future. King Herod knew what he was doing when he ordered all the infants in his domain murdered. Nothing showed how total his power was than that he could contemplate such a measure with equanimity.
The potential horror of Zika challenges human society at its point of maximum vulnerability. How far would people go to ensure that they have ‘normal, healthy’ children? How far is it permissible to go to avoid the opposite? Should a woman who is carrying a child with microcephaly in her womb be allowed to abort the pregnancy? Should she be encouraged, even? It may sound callous and outrageous on first inspection, but the same logic is already in application in some genetic disorders, including Sickle Cell Anaemia.Where does Public Health shade into Eugenics?
The unique challenge posed by Zika can be sensed from the spate of measures and counter-measures churned out by various governments. The Brazilian government is distributing insect repellents to 400,000 expectant women who qualify for BolsaFamilia – the local ‘cash transfer’ scheme that is in operation. 310,000 health workers have been deployed to sensitise the public and teach citizens how to keep mosquitoes at bay. Environmental health officials attacking the breeding grounds of mosquitoes have been joined by 220,000 soldiers. Brazil is naturally motivated by the welfare of its citizens. But beyond that is the fact that, troubled as it is already by a deep economic crisis, Zika could drive the world away from Brazil and imperil its tourism and the Olympics of 2016 on which it has so much riding.
Some governments in the Latin American neighbourhood have already advised women of child-bearing age to delay getting pregnant for up to a year, presumably to allow the worst of the danger to blow over. Even Jamaica, where no case has yet been reported, has given similar advice. El Salvador recommended that its women should delay pregnancy till 2018. Panama issued a warning to women from its indigenous community, who have a relatively high rate of infection with Zika, not to conceive – Period.
Even the governments of the United States and some European countries – not directly affected, find it necessary to advise that pregnant women avoid the ‘hot-spots’ for now.
There are scary, ‘out of contol’ scenarios. One of these is – if it is true that infected male persons can become carriers and go on to spread the infection to others through sexual or other person-to-person contact, like the reported case of the researcher in Senegal. Another one is if the quiescent virus that has always been present ‘in the hood’ – in Uganda or Senegal or even Nigeria- suddenly ‘lights up’ in tandem with what is happening in Latin America.
In the process of mounting a response to Zika, some of the fault-lines and controversies have been opened up afresh. Latin America is strongly Catholic. Catholic doctrine frowns on abortion and many aspects of birth control. Even sex education is circumscribed by strict rules. And yet all of these are tools which will have to be deployed – officially and un-officially, if Zika is truly on the rampage and society needs to be saved. In El Salvador, abortion is forbidden by the law, even if the woman’s life is in danger. The situation is not much different in Brazil, although momentum is now building up to end most of the bans. Sex education in the whole region is inadequate. Health workers are reluctant to prescribe contraceptives for teenagers and women who have not had children.
The vector of the Zika virus is the mosquito AedesEgypti, although it is also said to be spread by the Tiger mosquito – AedesAlbopictus.AedesEgypti is an aggressive daytime biter that bites people indoors and outdoors. The illness caused by the virus itself is usually a mild fever with a rash. Death or serious debilitation is almost unknown. There is no vaccine or specific treatment at the present time. It is possible that there are already large numbers of people who are carriers of the virus, but show no evidence of illness themselves.
Why has the Zika virus, which has been around for so long, suddenly become a clear and present danger.
The uniqueness of Zika, the ‘crossing generational borders’ in terms of who is the patient and who is the victim, the suggested possibility that there may be person-to-person transmission, in addition to vector-to-person, and the fact that the virus renders the human certainty of not just the present but the future shaky fits it pat into the end-time scenario which is popular in Christian lore. One major pastor of a Pentecostal church in Nigeria at the beginning of this year predicted the advent of ‘a disease worse that AIDS’. Is Zika that disease? Is this one of the end-time ‘plagues’?
Perhaps Zika has been over-blown, and, like all fads, will soon blow over. But we cannot take a chance on that. All the best minds must come to work on the problem. That a virusdiscovered in 1947 has no vaccine or remedy tagged to it can only be due to the fact that it was not seen as a significant threat. Now that it has shown itself in its sinister essence, or mutated into a potent trans-generational evil, it needs to be taken down. One of the abiding certainties driving human life is the conviction that the future will be better than the past. It is the reason why people – in Yoruba culture and other Nigerian cultures, are ready to skimp and save and deny themselves in order to educate and care for their children. If the promise of the future is taken away rudely by cruel disease, the rationale for life itself becomes questionable for many. If Zika is what it appears to be, it is an ontological threat to human life. As the language goes in Environmental Health, it is a nuisance that must be abated.
And if it is not?
Even if Zika proves not to be the looming gargantuan epidemic that it is being ‘talked up’ to be, in exposing it to the harsh scrutiny of Science, we stand to gain Knowledge. Nothing is lost by getting governments to see the need to prescribe, enforce, and fund common-sense precautions to further strengthenpublic health and safety. Some extremely restrictive social norms in some parts of the world will be loosened, and unpleasant realities, such as the need for society to formalize a common-sense stand on Abortion and Sex Education, will have been faced and talked through.
In the end, Society will be the better for it.
The Zika virus linked to a microcephaly outbreak in Latin America could spread to Africa and Asia, with the world’s highest birth rates, the World Health Organization warned as it launched a global response unit against the new emergency.
The WHO on Monday declared an international public health emergency due to Zika’s link to thousands of recent birth defects in Brazil.
“We’ve now set up a global response unit which brings together all people across WHO, in headquarters, in the regions, to deal with a formal response using all the lessons we’ve learned from the Ebola crisis,” Reuters quoted Anthony Costello, WHO director for maternal, child and adolescent health, as saying on the issue.
“The reason it’s a global concern is that we are worried that this could also spread back to other areas of the world where the population may not be immune,” he told a news conference in Geneva on Tuesday.
“And we know that the mosquitos that carry Zika virus – if that association is confirmed – are present through Africa, parts of southern Europe and many parts of Asia, particularly South Asia.”
Costello added the WHO was drafting “good guidelines” for pregnant women and mustering experts to work on a definition of microcephaly including a standardised measurement of baby heads.