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{"id":762,"date":"2016-02-02T05:16:17","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T05:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whid.co\/?p=762"},"modified":"2016-02-02T05:21:13","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T05:21:13","slug":"who-holds-emergency-meeting-on-zika-virus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whid.co\/who-holds-emergency-meeting-on-zika-virus\/","title":{"rendered":"WHO holds emergency meeting on Zika virus"},"content":{"rendered":"<section>The UN body, criticized for being slow to act, is urged by the scientist who co-discovered Ebola to declare a global emergency.<\/section>\n<figure id=\"content_photo\"><a title=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/mg.co.za\/article\/2016-02-01-who-holds-emergency-meeting-on-zika-virus\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"A municipal health worker carries out fumigation on a street as part of the city's efforts to prevent the spread of the Zika virus vector, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (Jorge Cabrera, Reuters)\" src=\"http:\/\/cdn.mg.co.za\/crop\/content\/images\/2016\/02\/01\/zaki_landscape.jpg\/676x380\/\" width=\"676\" height=\"380\" \/> <\/a><\/figure>\n<div id=\"body_content\">\n<p>An emergency World Health Organization committee is meeting on Monday to advise on the response to the Zika virus<span style=\"color: #000000;\">, as the number of infected people continues to soar.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The committee will decide whether to designate the mosquito-borne virus \u2013 which has been linked to serious birth defects \u2013 a global emergency meriting immediate coordinated international action, amid criticism that it has been too slow to act.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">On Thursday, WHO&#8217;s director general, Margaret Chan, said the virus was spreading explosively.\u00a0 The latest figures from Colombia, released over the weekend, backed her analysis, showing 20\u00a0297 confirmed cases of the disease in the South American country, including 2\u00a0116 pregnant women, making it the second most affected country after Brazil.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">According to Colombian officials, the number of pregnant women confirmed to be affected has doubled in a week.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">In Brazil, Zika has been linked, although not definitively so, to 4\u00a0000 cases of mictocephaly, in which babies are born with smaller than normal heads, raising global fears about a virus that was previously considered relatively benign.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Concerns have been amplified by the fact that the Olympics take place in Rio de Janeiro this summer, when about half a million tourists are expected to visit the city.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The WHO, which says there could be as many as 4m clinical cases of Zika in the Americas \u2013 although some experts think the figure could be much higher \u2013 is under pressure to come up with a speedy and effective plan of action.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The scientist who co-discovered Ebola has urged WHO to learn from its mistakes on its handling of that virus by quickly declaring a global health emergency over Zika.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: \u201cBy any means this [Zika] is a public health emergency \u2013 with the sheer number of people coming down with a flu-like syndrome\u201d. The fact that some people developed neurological symptoms and the impact on the fetus were also a concern.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Speaking to BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today program, Piot added: \u201cWHO clearly dropped the ball when it came to responding to the Ebola virus. It took about five months to declare the Ebola virus in west Africa as a public health emergency of international concern. Today that [WHO] committee is meeting and I have all confidence that they will declare this as a public health emergency. Several reports have been published [on the response to Ebola] and the WHO can, and must, do better.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Piot said there was little danger of Zika spreading to the UK. \u201cZika and Ebola are different. The mode of transmission is different, that\u2019s why I\u2019m not concerned for the UK. There is no way that the aedes mosquito can spread here, it is too cold.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University in Washington, US, who has worked with WHO and written extensively about pandemics and policy, said Zika should have been declared an emergency as soon as the link between the virus and microcephaly was made. \u201cMy chief criticism is of WHO in Geneva,\u201d he told Reuters. \u201cAfter being widely condemned for acting late on Ebola, it is now sitting back with Zika.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">But officials at WHO, the United Nations health organization, say the precise nature of any link between Zika and microcephaly remains unclear.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Although the disease does not pose the same threat to life as Ebola, and there has only been one case of possible person-to-person sexual transmission, according to the WHO, experts have warned that Zika poses a serious threat because of a number of its characteristics.\u00a0 These include the fact that an estimated 80% of infected people do not have any symptoms and that there is no vaccine in prospect.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The Aedes aegypti\u00a0 mosquitoes that transmit the virus thrive in urban conditions and are spreading as global warming takes effect.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">An Indonesian research institute said on Sunday that it had found one confirmed Zika case on Sumatra island in a 27-year-old man who had never traveled overseas. The virus has previously been detected in a small number of people in south-east Asia, including one case in Indonesia, reports suggest. The Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta, said it concluded that the virus had been circulating in the country \u201cfor a while\u201d. \u2013\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u00a9 Guardian News and Media 2016 <time datetime=\"2016-02-01\">01.02.2016 Haroon Siddique, Matthew Weaver<\/time><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The UN body, criticized for being slow to act, is urged by the scientist who co-discovered Ebola to declare a global emergency. An emergency World Health Organization committee is meeting on Monday to advise on the response to the Zika<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/whid.co\/who-holds-emergency-meeting-on-zika-virus\/\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_oct_exclude_from_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":764,"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions\/764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}