Prep for collateral damage

The pandemic of the novel coronavirus is a bow wave, slicing through whole populations at breakneck speed. But what is not being seen yet is the enormous collateral damage to global health. The pandemic is making it harder or impossible to combat such scourges as measles, polio, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, which caused death and suffering even before covid-19, and now will bring even more. The wake of the pandemic may become every bit as devastating as the bow wave.

The decades-long quest to eradicate polio, which came close to success, is now being paused to fight the coronavirus.

In rare cases, the use of the oral polio vaccine, which uses a mixture of live, weakened strains, can revert and spread, causing circulating vaccine-derived polio virus, or cVDPV, which occurred in a number of countries in Africa and Asia last year. A high-level World Health Organization panel warned recently that, “The risk of new outbreaks in new countries is considered extremely high, even probable.”

Meanwhile, the Measles & Rubella Initative, a global partnership to stop measles, reports that because of the pause in mass vaccination campaigns, over 117 million children in 37 countries may miss out on receiving the measles vaccine this year. This is a major setback when measles cases have exploded around the globe and claimed more than 140,000 lives in 2018, mostly children under the age of 5.

At the same time, Washington Post correspondents Max Bearak and Joanna Slater report that in Africa and South Asia, the coronavirus will affect carriers of HIV and tuberculosis disproportionately. Tuberculosis is primarily a respiratory disease, like covid-19, which means that those who suffer from it often have severely diminished lung health. And HIV causes a progressive failure of the immune system, leaving carriers more susceptible to death from other infections. There are also serious concerns that the coronavirus pandemic could disrupt health-care systems and lead to a resurgence in malaria, which killed 405,000 people around the world in 2018.

One virus is creating so much mayhem that other diseases will flourish, too.