‘No risk in SA’ as WHO meets on Zika

SOUTH Africans have no need to worry about the Zika virus that is rapidly sweeping across the Americas, but pregnant women should cancel any plans to visit infected areas.

This is according to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, which has offered laboratory testing to pregnant women who have been to affected areas.

The World Health Organisation has called an emergency meeting tomorrow after its directorgeneral, Margaret Chan, said the spread of Zika in 20 countries in the Americas was “explosive”.

The virus is suspected of being responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of babies born with microcephaly — underdeveloped skulls and brains.

Lucille Blumberg, deputy director of the NICD, said Zika had not been found further south in Africa than Uganda, and there had been no cases for more than a year.

South Africa’s subspecies of the mosquito that spreads the virus “tends not to bite humans”, she said, and was far less susceptible to the virus than its South American cousin.

The virus cannot spread from human to human, but a mosquito can get it from a human who has been infected by another mosquito.

Blumberg said that “even though the possibility of an infected traveller introducing Zika virus to South Africa obviously does exist”, the local subspecies had a limited flight range of only a few metres, and tended not to enter buildings.

“There may well be imported cases of Zika in travellers returning to South Africa but they don’t pose any risk to the local population.”

The NICD said the 10 cases of typhoid fever identified in the past week — seven in Gauteng and three in the Western Cape — were not related, apart from two siblings who contracted it. There were usually around 100 cases a year. “These cases are sporadic and do not represent an outbreak,” said Blumberg.