2016 is the year of Zika: Why India should be armed and afraid
If the year 2015 saw the emergence of Ebola as a new health problem globally, 2016 is already grappling with another global threat in the form of Zika virus.
In the past one decade, we have seen such outbreaks of new viruses very frequently - severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome Coronavirus, avian influenza A, Swine flu, and so on.
Given the globalised world we live in, movement of new disease-causing pathogens has become as easy as global travel and trade. In the pre-globalisation era too, HIV spread out pretty fast in almost all countries. Now it is possible for pathogens to move from one part of the globe to another and start replicating within days of their discovery.
Zika illustrates this point. The mosquito-borne virus was first isolated from a rhesus monkey in Uganda in 1947, and caused sporadic human infections in some African and Asian countries, with usually mild symptoms of fever and rashes. In 2007, it caused an epidemic on Yap Island and then spread to countries in Oceania before arriving in Central and South America.
With several thousand cases in Brazil alone, Zika virus could be following in the footsteps of dengue and chikungunya - both of which are also transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquito.
With viruses and infections, an outbreak in any part of the world is potentially a threat for everyone else.
That's why health security has global connotations. Pathogens and viruses don't respect geopolitical borders and diplomatic relations.
You can't deploy armies and sophisticated weapons at borders to protect your country from these new-age attackers.
To deal with new threats like Zika, we need national health security system which can prevent, detect, and respond to them appropriately. Health security, like national security, needs high political commitment, investment and technical expertise. It should not be confused with emergency preparedness.
There is little that can be achieved when a disaster has already struck.
Health security involves disease surveillance at all levels to detect outbreaks early, laboratories that can identify pathogens and a health system equipped to respond immediately. All this can work when we have a robust government health system.
Some countries have learnt this the hard way. China did so after the SARS outbreak in 2003, when information was suppressed and not shared. It subsequently strengthened its response and reporting system, and has benefited while handling subsequent outbreaks.
In India, we have been running a disease surveillance programme and have biosecurity laboratories that can handle infectious pathogens. But the effectiveness of this system depends on the quality of primary health centres, community health centres and district hospitals - which all are supposed to feed with information from the ground.
That's where the problem lies because the government has not been spending enough to strengthen its health system.
When global emergencies take place, we respond with travel advisories and checks at ports and airports, but lack woefully in terms of everyday detection, response, and prevention. This is as big a challenge to India's security as from across political borders.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)