Taking note of the World Health Organisation (WHO) categorising India last month as a site of active transmission of the Zika virus, the United States sent out an advisory on Friday, informing its citizens in India about the number of confirmed Zika infections in India.
The WHO, it noted, placed India as a ‘Category-2’ country for Zika risk. A Category-2, the second highest on a four-point scale and that also includes 2015 Zika-hotspot Brazil, indicates that the virus is being actively transmitted within the country. Until April, India was a Category-4 country.
The advisory clarified that the U.S. itself did not see its citizens in India at greater risk for contracting the mosquito-borne infection than from March 2017. It, however, maintains that pregnant women ought not to be travelling to the country.
“At this time, the risk of Zika infection remains low for the U.S. citizen community in India,” says the U.S. State Department note.
In March, there was no public confirmation of the presence of Zika in India.
On 26 May, two days after the WHO re-classification, the Union Health Ministry confirmed that three laboratory-confirmed cases of Zika were reported from Ahmedabad between November 2016 and February 2017. The information wasn’t fully made public until the 15 May.
Dengue & chikungunya
The three cases of Zika virus were reported from Bapunagar area in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The Zika virus is transmitted through the bite of an infected Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also transmits dengue and chikungunya. The Health Ministry said the cases weren’t widely publicised because the outbreak had been contained and the WHO, in December 2016, had said that Zika was no longer an international health emergency.
The Hindu has previously reported that the Vibrant Gujarat summit in the State, in January, may have prompted the government to hush up Zika cases. Moreover, another report said, the government also noted 260 cases of microcephaly, a condition associated with Zika in infants, last year.
The Indian Council of Medical Research has tested 34,233 human samples and 12,647 mosquito samples for the presence of the virus.
Among those, close to 500 mosquitoes samples were collected from the Bapunagar area and were found negative for the virus.
