[Health officials in the northern state of Rajasthan, where Jaipur is located, expressed confidence that the outbreak is under control. Of the 135 people infected through Thursday, 125 have recovered from their symptoms, they said. Approximately 40 pregnant women have been infected with the virus, and they will receive special monitoring.]
By Joanna Slater
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A
public health department worker fumigates inside a house to prevent the spread
of
mosquito-borne
diseases in New Delhi on Oct. 9. (Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters)
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NEW DELHI — India is working to control an
outbreak of the Zika virus that has infected more than 130 people in the city
of Jaipur, a perennially popular tourist destination known for its rose-colored
palaces and buildings.
Zika is a virus spread primarily by mosquitoes
that causes mild symptoms like fever, rashes and aches in healthy adults.
However, when the virus infects pregnant women, particularly in their first
trimester, it has been linked to serious birth defects.
India is one of more than 80 countries where
the Zika virus is present, although the first confirmed cases were reported
only last year. The initial two flare-ups of the virus, in the western state of
Gujarat and the southern state of Tamil Nadu, involved just a handful of
infections.
The current outbreak is considerably larger
and for the first time, scientists found mosquitoes that were infected with the
virus, indicating that it was being transmitted locally.
Until this outbreak, Indian health
authorities had “never found [Zika] positive mosquitoes,” said Neena Valecha,
director of the National Institute for Malaria Research in Delhi. “That is what
was of concern.”
Health officials in the northern state of
Rajasthan, where Jaipur is located, expressed confidence that the outbreak is
under control. Of the 135 people infected through Thursday, 125 have recovered
from their symptoms, they said. Approximately 40 pregnant women have been infected
with the virus, and they will receive special monitoring.
Naveen Jain, health secretary for Rajasthan,
said staff from his department were visiting the affected areas on a daily
basis to screen for new cases, educate residents and eliminate breeding grounds
for mosquito larvae. They are also engaging in “fogging” operations — the
spraying of insecticide — to kill the adult mosquitoes that spread the virus.
“The positive cases are deteriorating very
fast and the situation is under control,” Jain said.
Officials have divided the affected area into
10 zones and formed more than 300 teams to canvass the vicinity, added Veenu
Gupta, additional chief secretary in the state’s health department.
Zika burst onto the global stage starting in
2015 when an unprecedented outbreak took place in South America, infecting
hundreds of thousands of people. In Brazil, more than 1,000 babies were born
with serious birth defects such as microcephaly, a condition where babies’
heads are abnormally small and sometimes their brains underdeveloped.
Subsequent research by the Centers for
Disease Control has shown that about 1 in 10 women infected with the virus give
birth to babies with grave birth defects — a figure that rises when the
infection takes place in the first trimester.
While the large epidemic that gripped Latin
America has subsided, “any act of transmission for us is a concern, especially
in urbanized centers with a large population,” said Elizabeth Brickley, a Zika
expert and professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Brickley said that about 80 percent of the
people infected with Zika show no symptoms, so the detected cases likely
represent only a fraction of the actual circulation of the virus. What’s more,
in a place like India, some people have already been exposed to a related
mosquito-borne virus that causes Dengue fever — and those antibodies can in
turn lead to inaccurate test results for Zika.
Several vaccines for Zika are in development,
but for now “avoiding mosquito bites is the best advice we have,” Brickley
said.
The outbreak comes at an inopportune time for
the tourism industry in Rajasthan, which is gearing up for the start of the
high season. Every winter, millions of tourists from other parts of India and
from around the world travel to Rajasthan and especially its capital, Jaipur,
the focus of the outbreak.
The city is one of the stops on India’s famed
“golden triangle” of tourist destinations that also includes Agra, home of the
Taj Mahal, and Delhi, the nation’s capital. Kuldeep Ranka, principal secretary
in Rajasthan’s tourism department, said that the outbreak is “effectively contained”
and “it is not affecting tourism.”
Shastri Nagar, the neighborhood where the
outbreak is centered, is a working-class area near Jaipur’s famous walled old
city. Lalit Soni, 24, a local resident, said that a neighbor down the road, a
doctor, was infected with the virus but recovered rapidly. Soni credited state
health officials with playing a proactive role in tackling the outbreak through
door-to-door visits and by cleaning ditches where standing water had gathered.
Divyanshu Maurya, 25, said that when news of
the outbreak spread, his initial reaction was fear. When he himself fell ill
with fever for two days, he worried that he might have Zika. (In the end, he
did not.) Maurya, too, said that the government’s education and
mosquito-eradication efforts had helped ease local worries.
Krishnaraj Singh Jasana in Jaipur contributed
to this report.
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