The Zika virus is a flu-like disease that is transmitted by the
Aedes aegypti mosquito (AFP Photo/Luis Robayo)
With summer approaching, Zika may find its way into
virus-carrying mosquitoes in Europe or the United States, disease
experts have warned, but any outbreaks are likely to be small and
short-lived.
Doctors and scientists attending a major infectious diseases
conference in Amsterdam said there was no reason to panic, and the
idea of screening travellers was far-fetched.
Zika is borne by the Aedes aegypti mosquito found in Latin
America and the Caribbean, regions still in the grip of an outbreak
of the virus which has been linked to severe brain damage in babies
and rare neurological diseases in adults.
“We have to accept that someday there will be a… traveller coming
back from South America with Zika virus in his or her blood and
there is a potential risk of starting a transmission,” tropical
medicine professor Eskild Petersen of Denmark’s Aarhus University
said Monday.
“I would say that the southern part of the United States and
southern Europe are definitely at risk,” he told AFP on the
conference sidelines.
However, he stressed, the risk should not be exaggerated. “It is
a disease which in the vast majority of cases is a mild viral
disease.”
Rare cases of sexual virus transmission have also been recorded.
– Unknown entity –
The warmer summer months bring with them the peak mosquito season
for Europe and the United States after the insects’ eggs — typically
found in stagnant water — hatch.
In Europe, the potential threat comes from a related mosquito,
Aedes albopictus, which began to spread in southern Europe about 25
years ago.
Albopictus is not known to have transmitted Zika to humans in the
wild, but has been shown capable of doing so in laboratory
experiments.
“A real risk for Europe? No, I don’t think so,” said Jean-Paul
Stahl, an infectious diseases expert from the Grenoble University
Hospital in France.
“The vector (the mosquito) is in the Mediterranean areas, but we
don’t have the virus. Not yet.”
There is a risk of “some little outbreaks” around a single
imported case, he added, “but I don’t think at this time the virus
will resettle in Europe.”
The main challenge, according to Petersen, would be to prevent
infected blood making its way into blood banks and being given to a
patient with low immune protection.
According to Nick Beeching, a senior lecturer on infectious
diseases at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, it is hard to
predict threat based on the limited data available.
Very little is known about Zika — how long it may hide out in the
human body, the degree of risk of sexual transmission, and the full
list of diseases it may cause.
“We think its mostly transmitted by the mosquitos that transmit
dengue and similar infections, so we think there is probably not
going to be much of a problem in countries where you don’t have
those mosquitoes,” said Beeching.
But “we don’t know that for sure.”
Studies are ongoing to see if other mosquitoes elsewhere may also
transmit the virus.
Petersen said there may also be a risk for Africa, where Zika was
first identified in 1947, in Uganda.
If the virus had evolved genetically since then, it could mean
that people in tropical Africa — who may have originally enjoyed
Zika immunity — no longer do.
“The latest report I have seen, it was (Zika) described from the
Cape Verde islands, which is halfway between Brazil and Africa,” he
cautioned.
Screening all travellers from South America was “absolutely
impossible” and not the solution, Petersen stressed.
“You have I don’t know how many planes from South America to
Europe every day. And if people knew that they would be screened
they would just take a paracetamol half an hour before landing and
they would not report” any fever.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/zika-outbreaks-in-us-and-europe-likely-to-be-short-lived-researchers/