Roundup: UN agencies aid Brazil in efforts to fight Zika virus

The UN agencies are working out plans to help Brazil in its efforts to fight the outbreak of Zika virus, UN officials said here Wednesday.

The plans include the transfer of a nuclear technique to the Latin American country to reduce the population of mosquitos which are believed as the main vehicle to spread the epidemic in the country.

Earlier Wednesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced plans to facilitate the transfer of a nuclear technique to Brazil to help the country's battle with the Zika virus by suppressing the population of mosquitos that transmit the disease.

A cobalt-60 gamma cell irradiator is expected to be transferred to the Brazilian non-profit Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) centre Moscamed in Juazeiro, Bahia, the Vienna-based IAEA announced at an expert meeting in the Brazilian capital of Brasilia, said the officials.

It could, in a few months, help scale up the production of sterile male mosquitoes to be released in selected areas, and they, once released, mate with wild females who do not produce any offspring, effectively suppressing the insect population over time, experts said, agreeing that SIT was an efficient, safe, environmentally neutral and sustainable method to control mosquito populations and fight vector-borne diseases like Zika and dengue fever.

"Our discussion summarized the current status of all methods that can be used to fight disease-transmitting mosquitoes," said Marc Vreysen, who heads the insect pest control laboratory at the Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture, a shared office between the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and IAEA.

"Moscamed has long experience in applying SIT to fight insect pests, and was one of the first facilities to mass rear sterilized mosquitoes in the world," said Jair Virginio, the director of the FAO-IAEA division.

"The irradiator would allow our facility to produce up to 12 million sterilized male Aedes aegypti mosquitos per week, reaching up to 750,000 people in 15 municipalities in the Brazilian states of Bahia and Pernambuco, which have been particularly hard-hit by Zika."

The IAEA announcement came as international experts from 12 countries gathered in Brasilia for a two-day meeting to share experiences on the use of SIT as part of a comprehensive approach to control mosquito populations along with other methods, such as site inspections and fumigation.

The meeting, organized in cooperation with the Brazilian Ministry of Health, is part of the IAEA's response to the current Zika outbreak in Central and South America. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Zika an international public health emergency earlier this month.

Also on Wednesday, the director-general of the WHO, Margaret Chan, arrived in the northeast of the Brazil to visit the area most affected by neurological disorders suspected of being linked to the Zika virus, including microcephaly in babies, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters here.

Chan visited a hospital and clinical research centre in Recife where a significant number of pregnant women who contracted the Zika virus during pregnancy have delivered babies with microcephaly, the spokesman said.

Carissa Etienne, the director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), is also taking part in the visit, which will help contribute to an ongoing assessment of the Zika virus situation and response.

PAHO reported that a group of its experts are working in Colombia this week to support the country's efforts to respond to the outbreak of Zika virus. Colombian health authorities report that nearly 37,000 people have been affected, including 6,300 pregnant women.

Zika was originally identified in the 1940s in Africa. Recently, the association with a condition known as microcephaly, in which babies have been born with unusually small and deformed heads to women who had Zika during pregnancy, has raised global alarms. On Feb. 1, the WHO declared the virus and its link to the birth defects a public health emergency.

More than 4,000 reported cases of microcephaly have been registered in Brazil, among them over 400 have already been confirmed. Of the confirmed cases, 141 were attributable to the Zika virus.

Cases of microcephaly in babies born from women infected with Zika were also registered in the United States and other Latin American countries.

The disease is also linked with a rise of Guillain-Barre syndrome cases. It is believed that Zika can trigger Guillain-Barre in people with a predisposition to this auto-immune disease, which affects the nerve system. Enditem