Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Friday vowed to “win the war” against the Zika virus, but some experts criticized her government’s response and warned that the Rio de Janeiro Olympics could fuel the disease’s spread.
The tropical virus is blamed for cases of brain damage in babies as it sweeps through Latin America, and Rousseff, whose government is deploying 220,000 soldiers to help eradicate the mosquitoes that transmit it, compared the outbreak with a battle.
“As long as [the mosquitoes] are reproducing, we are all losing the battle. We have to mobilize to win it,” she said. “We are going to win this war. We are going to show that the Brazilian people are capable of winning this war.”
Photo: Reuters
Rousseff and US President Barack Obama on Friday agreed to launch a high-level bilateral group to develop a vaccine.
The initiative is to be based on an existing cooperation agreement between Brazil’s Butantan Institute of biomedical research and the US National Institutes of Health.
The hunt for a vaccine could take years, experts said.
At the epicenter of Brazil’s outbreak, in the northeastern state of Bahia, one health expert deep in the trenches of the Zika fight accused Rousseff’s administration of acting too late, and warned that the Olympics poses a transmission risk.
“The Brazilian government has not fought the mosquito population. That is Brazil’s great sin,” said Gubio Soares, a virologist at the Federal University of Bahia who — in April last year — was the first person to isolate the Zika virus in Brazil.
“Cities are not fulfilling their duty to hire qualified people [for mosquito eradication]. Campaigns to fight mosquitoes are insufficient,” he said.
Despite promises by Rio de Janeiro authorities to step up mosquito control measures for the August Olympics, Soares warned that the Games — which are expected to bring hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world — risked turning into a vector.
“I don’t think [Zika] will threaten the [Olympic] Games, but it will be a source of transmission,” he told reporters.
Since Zika — which originated in Africa — was detected in Latin America last year, there has been a surge in babies born with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads.
Brazil, the hardest hit, sounded the alarm in October last year, when a rash of microcephaly cases emerged in the nation’s northeast.
Since then, there have been 270 confirmed cases of microcephaly and 3,448 suspected cases, up from 147 in 2014.
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