WHO says 3 Zika cases detected in India for first time
Virus hit earlier than thought in Brazil, Florida
NEW DELHI, May 28, (Agencies): India has reported its first three cases of the Zika virus, including two pregnant women who delivered healthy babies.
Health Ministry officials said Sunday that the three patients in western Gujarat state had recovered. “There is no need to panic,” Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, a top Health Ministry official, told reporters.
The World Health Organization said in a statement Friday that the three cases that India reported to the WHO on May 15 were detected through routine blood surveillance in a hospital in Ahmadabad, Gujarat’s capital. Two cases were detected in February and November last year, while a third case was detected in January this year.
Swaminathan, who heads the Indian Council of Medical Research, said the three patients had not traveled overseas and had acquired the infection locally.
Zika is transmitted by the daytime-active Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes.
The medical journal Lancet has said 2.6 billion people living in parts of Asia and Africa could be at risk of Zika infection, based on analysis of travel, climate and mosquito patterns in those regions.
The vast majority of people infected by the Zika virus never get sick, and symptoms are mild for those who do, so surveillance systems may have missed cases.
Although Zika was first identified in 1947, the virus wasn’t considered a major health threat until a major outbreak in Brazil in 2015 revealed that it can lead to severe birth defects when pregnant women are infected.
The WHO says that although Zika causes only mild symptoms in most people, it sometimes causes complications including microcephaly and Guillain-Barre syndrome.
Babies born to Zika-infected mothers have been found to have microcephaly, or a birth defect where the head is abnormally small and brains might not have developed properly. Guillain-Barre syndrome is a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks part of the peripheral nervous system.
The WHO said the three were the first cases of Zika virus infections from India and provided evidence on the presence of the virus in the country.
“These findings suggest low level transmission of Zika virus and new cases may occur in the future,” it said.
The WHO said there was significant risk of the further spread of the virus and recommended that governments push ahead with efforts to control mosquitoes.
Studies using gene sequencing equipment to trace the path of Zika through the Americas show the virus arrived a year before the first case was detected in Brazil, and several months before it was first reported in Florida.
The findings, published in three different papers in the journal Nature, are drawn from nearly 200 Zika virus genome sequences collected from infected individuals and mosquitoes that transmit the virus.
Collectively, they show the potential for newer, more portable gene sequencing equipment to quickly trace the spread of emerging infectious diseases, experts said.
In one study, a team led by Oliver Pybus of the University of Oxford found that Zika first arrived in Brazil at the beginning of 2014, a full year prior to the first confirmed cases in May 2015.
Pybus’ study focused on how the virus established an early foothold in northeastern Brazil, from which it spread to other areas. Northeast Brazil was the region with the most recorded cases of Zika and microcephaly, a birth defect caused by the virus marked by small head and brain size.
Pybus said the region was “the nexus of the epidemic in Brazil” and played a key role in spreading the virus to other big Brazilian cities, such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, before spreading across the Americas.
His team was part of a consortium of British and Brazilian scientists who traveled across Brazil in a minibus, analyzing samples of the virus using Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ pocket-sized MinION DNA sequencer. The portable device was used in 2015 to track genetic changes in the Ebola virus as it evolved and spread in Guinea.