How India can beat Zika virus to the bite
Have you ever watched a mosquito closely? I know someone who used to kill mosquitoes and hoard their fleecy dead bodies in an ink pot. Call it schadenfreude, revenge or just plain immaturity. But I doubt if even he could tell the difference between an anopheles, culex or the now deadly aedes mosquito.
The new Zika virus is “spreading explosively” through aedes mosquitoes, the World Health Organization (WHO) has sent out an alarm on January 28. It can be found almost “everywhere in the Americas,” South to North, and has already infected about four million people. It is believed to have resulted in 4,180 babies born with abnormally small heads and brain damage in Brazil. Hundreds in Colombia have ended up with the rare paralysis disorder, Guillain-Barré Syndrome. There’s no treatment, no vaccine, no immunity.
Mosquitoes and malaria find mention in human history over millennia: from cuneiform clay tablets of Mesopotamia to Vedic scriptures of India to Greek poet Homer’s The Iliad. Who doesn’t know about the slender anopheles mosquito, with white-patched wings, that attacks after dusk, rests with its belly pointing upwards, makes a whining noise and infects over 200 million people with malaria and over 4,00,000 deaths every year?
But if you watch carefully, you may notice a different variety: mosquitoes that glide noiselessly, unlike the rest of their peers, sneak up from behind or below, in broad daylight. Stubby, short, spiral-striped in black and white, they rest parallel to their biting surface and suck blood aggressively. You can't shoo them away easily. They love human homes in congested, tropical cities, thrive in puddles of water (sewage to fancy flower pots) can fly upto three miles, guided by the breath, sweat and body heat of their targets. There’s no way you can ignore the aedes — be it aedes aegepti that causes Dengue, Yellow Fever and Zika, or aede albopictus that sets off chikungunya and West Nile Fever.
The Zika virus was first discovered in the Zika forests of Uganda in 1947. A fairly harmless germ, that no one really cared about till 2014, when it suddenly appeared in the Americas, especially in Brazil. The virus causes no symptoms in 80 per cent people. Just mild rashes, fever and runny eyes in some. No one knows why and how it suddenly triggered virulent outbreaks, linked to genetic mutation and neurological disorders, especially in babies. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has posted a travel alert: women of childbearing age should avoid countries where Zika is circulating (because, there is some talk that Zika might also be sexually-transmitted). And women in countries with Zika should avoid getting pregnant.
Meantime, scientists are gearing up for biological warfare (watch Ted Talk by entomologist Scott Ritchie) to destroy mosquitoes. How? By spraying a huge number of lab-manipulated mosquitoes, planted with bacteria that would either snuff out the virulence or the longevity of the disease-carrying bloodsuckers. Unanswered questions remain: will humanity survive, caught between the "good" mosquitoes and the "bad"? What if lab manipulations backfire and mosquitoes start mutating in some unknown way? What would happen to our environment if we were to rid the planet of all mosquitoes?
No one really knows. But one thing is certain: before Zika reaches India, we’d better follow the standard mosquito protection measures — repellents, pesticides, long dresses with long sleeves, thick clothing to resist bites, sleeping in air-conditioned rooms, mosquito netting and keeping screens on windows and doors. Last but not least, we could also keep an eye out on mosquito populations around us. Ink-potted or not, it always helps to know your enemy.