Zika crisis fuelled by ‘massive policy failure’: WHO chief

The spiralling crisis surrounding the Zika virus is due to decades of policy failures on mosquito control and poor access to family planning services, the World Health Organisation said on Monday.

“The spread of Zika... (is) the price being paid for a massive policy failure that dropped the ball on mosquito control in the 1970s,” WHO chief Margaret Chan told the opening of the UN health agency’s annual assembly.

Those failures have allowed the mosquito-borne virus to spread rapidly and create “a significant threat to global health,” Chan told some 3,000 delegates gathered from WHO’s 194 member countries.

Experts agree that Zika is behind a surge in Latin America in cases of the birth defect microcephaly – babies born with abnormally small heads and brains – after their mothers were infected with the virus.

The virus, which also causes the rare but serious neurological disorder Guillain-Barre Syndrome, in which the immune system attacks the nervous system, is mainly spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito but has also been shown to transmit through sexual contact.

Programmes in the 1950s and 60s targeted the aegypti in a bid to prevent the spread of dengue and yellow fever, which it also spreads, and all but eradicated the mosquito species from Central and South America.

But when the programmes were discontinued in the 1970s, the mosquito returned.Chan also decried policy failures in the realm of reproductive rights.