ONE of the stories to which Africa should pay a lot of attention is the outbreak of the Zika virus in 2015 in Brazil which has since then spread like wildfire to over 20 Latin American countries. The phenomenal spread of the mosquito-borne virus is now linked to the birth defects now plaguing over 4 000 babies in Brazil alone.
The claim is that such babies are born with unusually small-sized heads which in turn host tiny under-developed brains. This phenomenon known as micro-cephaly has been regarded as almost rare until the recent worrisome developments in Brazil. Health specialists argue that the deformed state of affected babies makes it unlikely they will ever lead a normal life, that is, if they survive at all the brain damage inflicted upon them before birth.
Africa needs to pay particular attention to claims by some scientists that the unfolding fight against the Zika virus that is taking place in Latin America is likely to be more prolonged and more complex than the fight against the Ebola virus which took place in West Africa in 2014 and 2015.
The irony here is that unlike the symptoms of the Ebola virus which are dramatic and visible, characterised by massive and horrific haemorrhaging, leaving in their wake highly contagious and fatal body fluids, those related to Zika virus are usually a mild fever and some rash.
Most victims, especially pregnant women, are not even aware that they are infected by this disease until it is too late to do anything about their pregnancy.
In other words the enormity of the damage caused by the Zika virus becomes visible and dramatic only when the irreversible deformities of the babies become obvious much later on.
The fact that Zika-related symptoms look and feel like those of other illnesses such as flu, yellow and mild dengue fevers, mild headaches, back pain etc makes it difficult for doctors to come up with a correct and timely diagnosis.
Worse still is the fact that there is no known cure at present to address the challenge posed by the Zika virus. Scientists in those countries with adequate resources are predicting that it will take between two to 10 years before a preventive cum curative vaccine becomes available to the general public.
The danger which Africa faces is to regard what is taking place in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, as a distant phenomenon that is unlikely to affect most of us located more than 8 000km away from the current Zika frontline.
This attitude is unhelpful and dangerous in so far as it can lull us into a false sense of safety.
Nowadays the globalisation process which involves rapid transfers of international capital rapid movement of people, goods and services, frequent promotion of cultural and business exchanges amongst different nationalities across the globe—all these and many more make it easy for the Zika virus to move from one region of the world into other regions.
Unlike in the past when air travel was rare and confined to a few elites, today thousands of people travel all over the globe on a daily basis, in the process collapsing vast distances of the world into a few hours of air-travel.
What is particularly worrisome for Africa is that the carrier of the Zika virus known as the Aedes-aegypti mosquito favours equatorial cum tropical-based habitats which Africa has in great abundance.
The virus itself is not only transmitted to humans by day-time active mosquitoes but also by infected humans through sexual contact.
Just to dramatise how close we are to such a Zika-virus based epidemic which can easily graduate into a pandemic of frightening proportions, the name itself comes from an overgrown forest in Uganda called Zika where an experiment to identify a fever related virus was carried out in 1947 using a monkey as a guinea pig.
The virus causing the fever was isolated and identified in humans for the first time in Nigeria in 1952 and described for the first time as a Zika virus in 1954. Similarly, another virus somewhat related to the Zika virus called the Chikungunya virus, was identified among the Makonde people of northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania. The name of the virus means “the illness of the bended walker” — a direct reference to the impact of the virus on humans!
The truth is that we cannot afford to look at what is happening in Brazil as distant and remote when in reality we have similar viruses on our continent. Medical history tells us that minor outbreaks of the Zika disease have occurred in several African countries close to the equator and have been somewhat contained so far maybe because most of us have acquired immunity of some kind to such a disease along the way.
What remains worrisome though is that the Zika virus that is plaguing South Americans right now is a strain of Asian origin which has subsequently mutated into a form that is deadly and capable of deforming the very conception and growth process of the human foetus. The implications of this development are dire for all of us!
What is most disturbing about the Zika related tragedy in Brazil is that scientists who claimed to be mosquito experts released genetically modified mosquitoes in big batches in Brazil in 2012 in the hope that the sterilised genes of male mosquitoes would radically disrupt the reproduction cycle of the mosquitoes in general through a kind of automated self-destructive process.
The fear now is that this experiment has horribly gone wrong as its outcomes seem to be wreaking havoc on a grand scale that was never anticipated!
Could it be a mere coincidence that Brazil, as the only country that had been earmarked as the first beneficiary of advanced insect science, has now become the epicentre of the spread of the Zika virus in the whole South America? Or is it that some scientists are onto a programme to find out how far they can go playing God vis-a-vis control of the growth and nature of the human population!
One is reminded here of the Tuskegee Syphilis study of 1932-1974 in US during which 399 blacks enlisted for the study were deliberately infected with syphilis without their knowledge and consent and prevented from accessing appropriate treatment, all in the interests of science!
Could it be that in 2012 Brazil was deliberately misled as to the true intentions of the mosquito experiment and is now paying the price in the same way that the Tuskegee victims did?
If indeed a country such as the US can do syphilis-related experiments to its own black citizens, what is there to stop them from doing the same with African people in the interests of science? Do our states in Africa have policies and systems and people in place to protect us from the consequences of such adventurous science?
This feeling that a lot of experiments are being carried out on our continent without taking our interests into account is something that refuses to go away, especially whenever the word “Ebola” is mentioned.
Now it seems the word “Zika” has to be added to those words which haunt most of us once they are mentioned!