Taiwan and China’s Hainan Island are at greater risk than anywhere in the region of having locally transmitted cases of the fast-spreading Zika virus, according to a prominent virologist.
Taiwan and Hainan both have populations of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is believed to be the main carrier of the Zika virus. The virus has infected 1.5 million people in Brazil alone in recent months, while also spreading throughout most of South America, Central America, the Caribbean and into Mexico, said Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and codiscoverer of the Ebola virus.
Southern China, including Hong Kong, has a different kind of mosquito, Aedes albopictus. That mosquito might also be able to carry the Zika virus, but is probably less efficient at transmitting it to people, Piot said in Hong Kong on Tuesday.
The northern two-thirds of China, including big cities like Shanghai and Chongqing, lie farther north than the usual range of either mosquito, according to a map that Piot presented as part of a videotaped speech at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, but the disease might also spread through sexual transmission farther north, he warned.
The mosquito season has barely begun in China this year, limiting the risk so far.
The Zika virus has been linked to a steep increase in Brazil in the number of cases of microcephaly, a condition in which babies are born with abnormally small heads. While the precise link of the Zika virus to microcephaly has not been conclusively established, the virus has been found in fetal brain tissue and amniotic fluid, Piot said.
“I would say beyond all reasonable doubt it is caused by the Zika virus,” he said.
About one in 4,000 people with the virus might also be stricken with Guillain-Barre syndrome, which causes temporary paralysis. Some patients end up requiring life support.
The National Health and Family Planning Commission in Beijing has disclosed 12 cases of people carrying the Zika virus so far, all of whom were said to have acquired the disease while traveling outside China. The first case was in Jiangxi Province, a man who was identified as having the disease on Feb. 9 and was declared to be fully recovered on Feb. 14.
Since then, seven cases have been confirmed in Guangdong Province and four in Zhejiang Province.
Centers for Disease Control chief medical officer Lo Yi-chun (羅一鈞) said that Taiwan’s sole case so far had been a young Thai man who arrived at a Taiwanese airport in January and was immediately detected there as having a fever. He was tested and found to have the Zika virus, but was allowed to go to his home in central Taiwan and recover there, because it was not mosquito season and the area where he lived did not have Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, Lo said.
Taiwan had a severe outbreak last year of dengue fever, a similar virus that is also carried by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Taiwan had 43,784 cases of dengue fever last year, almost all of them from local transmission and most of them in southern Taiwan.
Because of that experience, Taiwan has been particularly wary of the Zika virus and has been looking for ways to make sure that local mosquitoes do not become infected. Anyone arriving with a fever at an airport or seaport from areas with active Zika virus outbreaks — including Thailand, the Maldives and the Philippines — is required to have a blood test to determine whether they have the Zika virus, dengue fever or a third, similar virus, Chikungunya.
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