We are menaced by ever more diseases. But Zika, like most, hits the poor hardest (The Guardian)

[inanna]

Sunday 7 February 2016 05.30 GMT

Damage to newborn babies by the mosquito-borne disease is horrifying, so let’s address the problem at source

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To say that nobody saw Zika coming is an understatement. Like last year’s Ebola epidemic – and the panics about swine flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) before it – the virus blipped on almost no one’s radar. This is because, unlike other diseases transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, such as yellow fever and dengue, Zika usually results in a rash and a mild febrile illness and is not deadly. From 1947 to 2007, when the first major Zika outbreak hit Yap island in Micronesia, there were just 14 documented cases worldwide. Even when the virus sparked an epidemic in French Polynesia in late 2013 and doctors noted a marked increase in neurological and auto-immune complications, Zika caused barely a tremor.

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Nevertheless, with estimates that as many as 1.5 million Brazilians and as many as 4 million people across the Americas may have been infected – and with criticisms of her slow response to the West African Ebola epidemic still ringing in her ears – Chan is not minded to take chances. Hence her decision to sound the highest alert possible.

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And while health officials in several Latin American countries have advised women to avoid or delay getting pregnant, so far there is no definitive proof that it causes microcephaly. Indeed, it is hard not to resist the conclusion that, like HIV/Aids, it is the spectre of sexual transmission and the heartbreaking and highly visible defects in infants that are fuelling widespread dread of the disease, not the known risks.

Those risks, of course, are far lower if you are wealthy and can afford air-conditioning. It is surely no coincidence that it was in Recife, a city in which most of the 4 million inhabitants live in sprawling shanty towns interlaced with canals and stagnant pools of water, ideal for the Aedes mosquito, that the alarm was first sounded. Or that is in the favelas and communities living in the shadow of Rio’s Olympic park, where mosquitoes multiply in the puddles left by bulldozers, that Brazilian fumigation brigades are now concentrating their efforts.

cont'd...

Link: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/07/earth-menaced-by-diseases-zika-hits-poor-hardest