Brazil’s President says the country is losing the battle against the mosquito spreading the Zika virus, as experts warn the Olympics could fuel the disease’s spread.
President Dilma Rousseff called for a national effort to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits the virus, linked to brain damage in babies.
“We do not have a vaccine for Zika yet. The only thing we can do is fight the mosquito,” she told reporters during a visit to a command centre for the Zika crisis.
The tropical virus has been sweeping through Latin America and Ms Rousseff, whose government is deploying 220,000 soldiers to help eradicate the mosquitoes on February 13, likened the outbreak to a war.
“As long as (the mosquitoes) are reproducing, we are all losing the battle. We have to mobilise to win it,” she said.
“We are going to win this war. We are going to show that the Brazilian people are capable of winning this war.”
Her comments came after her own health minister warned Brazil was “losing the war against Aedes aegypti”.
The virus, which originated in Africa, has been linked to thousands of cases of babies being born in Brazil with microcephaly, meaning they have abnormally small heads and brains that have not developed properly.
Ms Rousseff said tests for the development of a vaccine would begin next week at the Butantan Institute, one of Brazil’s leading biomedical research centres in Sao Paulo.
She called on Brazilians to eliminate still water in puddles and open storage tanks in their homes where the insect breeds.
Rio de Janeiro Olympics a ‘transmission risk’
One health expert at the epicentre of the outbreak, in Bahia state in north-eastern Brazil, accused Ms Rousseff’s administration of acting too late, and warned that the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro pose a transmission risk.
“The Brazilian government has not fought the mosquito population. That is Brazil’s great sin,” Gubio Soares, a virologist at the Federal University of Bahia who was the first to isolate the Zika virus in Brazil in April last year, said.
“Cities are not fulfilling their duty to hire qualified people [for mosquito eradication]. Campaigns to fight mosquitoes are insufficient.”
Despite promises by authorities in Rio de Janeiro to step up mosquito control measures for the Olympics in August, Mr Soares warned the Games — which are expected to bring hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world — risked turning into a vector.
“I don’t think [Zika] will threaten the Games, but it will be a source of transmission,” he said.
The virus was detected in Latin America last year and Brazil, the hardest hit, sounded the alarm in October, when a rash of microcephaly cases emerged in the north-east.
Since then, there have been 270 confirmed cases of microcephaly and 3,448 suspected cases, up from 147 in 2014.
The otherwise mild Zika virus is also suspected of causing a rare neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome in some patients, in which the immune system attacks the nervous system, causing weakness and sometimes paralysis.
Most patients recover, but the syndrome is sometimes deadly.
Jitters over Zika, which causes flu-like symptoms and a rash, have spread to the United States and Europe, where dozens of returning travellers have been diagnosed with the disease.
The Zika virus is “spreading explosively” and could infect as many as 4 million people in the Americas, according to the World Health Organisation.
The WHO expects the virus to spread to every country in the Americas except Canada and Chile. It is currently present in 23 countries and territories in the region.
The Aedes aegypti mosquito also spreads the dengue virus, which infected 1.65 million people in Brazil last year, 863 of whom died, in the country’s worst outbreak of the tropical disease.
Brazil eradicated the mosquito in the 1950s, using chemicals that are now banned, officials said.
Reuters