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GENEVA / ZIKA UPDATE
STORY: GENEVA/ ZIKA UPDATE
TRT: 02:44
SOURCE: UNTV CH
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 2 FEBRUARY 2016, GENEVA
2.Wide shot, presser
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Antony Costello, Director Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health for World Health Organisation (WHO):
“This is not a life threating infection like HIV or like Ebola. But the problem is that the complications of this relatively mild illness do have potentially devastating effects for families: to have a child with microcephaly and to have a tenfold increase in numbers and the potential for spread not just across Latin America, but into Africa, into Asia which have the highest birth rates in the world, we believe is a matter of public health concern and constitutes an international emergency and particularly given that our tools for detecting both, the virus and also for doing the surveillance for this relatively rare condition need to be worked on urgently.”
4. Med shot, journalists
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Antony Costello, Director Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health for World Health Organisation (WHO):
”The worry with Zika virus which in three quarters, even 80 per cent, will not produce symptoms in people, is there is parent association with a surge in cases of microcephaly. Now microcephaly means an abnormally small head, it is a relatively rare condition, statistics vary from different parts of the world, somewhere one in between one in 3,000, one in 5,000, maybe more.”
6. Med shot, panel
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Antony Costello, Director Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health for World Health Organisation (WHO):
”Zika virus, we don’t have a commercially available diagnostic test and further the tests we do have only detect the virus when it is active, let’s say during a period of about five days. So that means that many women could have been exposed to Zika virus and now you cannot detect whether they had the infection or not.”
8. Med shot, panel
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Christophe Boulierac, Spokesperson for United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF):
”We are engaging communities in Brazil, and there are simple measures that we want to promote that can help keep people safe, including using insect repellents, just to go more into details, covering as much of the body as possible with long light coloured clothing, removing places where mosquitoes can breed and putting screens on windows and doors.”
9. Wide shot, journalists
The World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the Zika virus, linked to a microcephaly outbreak in Latin America, could spread to Africa and Asia.
Speaking at a press conference today in Geneva (2 Feb), WHO’s Dr. Antony Costello said that Zika was not a life threating infection like HIV or Ebola, but that this “relatively mild illness has potentially devastating effects for families.”
WHO has set up a global response unit which brings together all people across WHO, at Geneva headquarters, and in the regions, to deal with a formal response. Although there is still no conclusive evidence of the causal link between microcephaly and the Zika virus, there is enough concern to warrant immediate action, according to WHO.
The WHO expert noted that the current problem they face is that ”we don’t have a commercially available diagnostic test and further the tests we do have only detect the virus when it is active, let’s say during a period of about five days.”
Costello also said, “that means that many women could have been exposed to Zika virus and now you cannot detect whether they had the infection or not.”
With the Zika virus now a public health emergency affecting more than 20 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) is working with governments to mobilize communities to protect themselves from infection.
There are simple measures that can help keep people safe, according to UNICEF’s spokesperson Christophe Boulierac.
He said, “we are engaging communities in Brazil, and there are simple measures that we want to promote that can help keep people safe, including using insect repellents, just to go more into details, covering as much of the body as possible with long light coloured clothing, removing places where mosquitoes can breed and putting screens on windows and doors.”
Boulierac also advised pregnant women -who think they have been exposed to the virus- to seek care by a trained health provider.
Brazil was the first country to sound the alarm in the current crisis, warning in October that a number of microcephaly cases had emerged in the northeast. It has since become the worst affected country, with some 4, 000 suspected cases of microcephaly.
Microcephaly is a neuro-developmental disorder. It is usually defined as a head circumference more than two standard deviations below the mean for age and sex. In general, life expectancy for individuals with microcephaly is reduced and the prognosis for normal brain function is poor.
The Zika virus is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also spreads dengue fever, and which is found everywhere in the Americas except Canada and Chile.
On Monday, WHO had declared the mosquito-borne Zika virus an international public health emergency. The disease has been linked to thousands of recent birth defects in Brazil.
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