Zika is no longer a world public health emergency: WHO

GENEVA: The World Health Organization announced that the Zika virus outbreak, linked to deformations in babies’ heads and brains, no longer poses a world public health emergency, though it warned the epidemic remains a challenge.

Brazil, the epicentre of the outbreak, has however refused to downgrade the risk, while experts swiftly lashed out against the world health body’s decision. “The Zika virus remains a highly significant and long term problem, but it is not any more a public health emergency of international concern,” the world health body’s emergency committee chair Dr David Heymann said.

While Zika causes only mild symptoms in most people, pregnant women with the virus risk giving birth to babies with microcephaly -- a deformation that leads to abnormally small brains and heads. It can also cause rare adult-onset neurological problems such as Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which can result in paralysis and even death.

In the outbreak that began in mid-2015, more than 1.5 million people have been infected with Zika, mainly in Brazil.

More than 1,600 babies have been born with microcephaly since last year, according to the WHO. The UN global health agency declared the Zika epidemic a global health emergency in February 2016.

Brazil on Friday said it would continue to treat the outbreak as an emergency. In most cases worldwide, people have been infected with the virus by mosquitoes, though some have contracted the disease through sexual contact.