What is Zika, ask people of affected village

Residents of Bapunagar, where the first cases were detected, knew nothing about the outbreak

The Sonaria block of Bapunagar in Ahmedabad, where one case of Zika was detected.

Last week, Sonal Parmar, 22, a resident of Soneria Block, a cluster of 35 buildings in Bapunagar, east of Ahmedabad, delivered a healthy baby girl. Between January and February, when Ms. Parmar was in her fourth month of pregnancy, three people from Bapunagar, including one from Soneria, tested positive for the Zika virus.

“What is Zika,” Ms. Parmar asks, as she plays with her baby. “Health workers would come, put medicines in the water tanks and sometimes empty them. But that has been happening for malaria and dengue for a long time.”

A few houses away Rekha Sarkar had a baby boy on May 23. She too was unaware about the mosquito-borne virus. “When someone knows about a disease, there is obviously more caution,” she says. “But we were not informed about anything.”

Like the six lakh other residents of Bapunagar, the women had no clue about the outbreak.

Neither the health workers who carry out door-to-door activities nor the doctors the women visited for follow-ups warned them about the outbreak, or that being infected could have resulted in their children being born with severe anomalies. While the virus would give most people mild symptoms — fever, headache, skin rashes — it is also known to cause microcephaly (a smaller head, which results in an underdeveloped brain) in developing foetuses.

Brazil’s example

In Brazil, the worst-affected country, thousands of babies were born with brain deformities since the outbreak of the disease in 2015. In the USA in 2016, 51 Zika-infected mothers gave birth to 51 babies with birth defects; 43 of the infants had microcephaly. The country also reported 77 pregnancy losses in infected women.

Despite this, the Gujarat government kept the detection under wraps, leaving the population vulnerable and uninformed. After the first detection in India, on January 4, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation brought 250 health workers and entomologists to Bapunagar to carry out intensive door-to-door work, including collecting blood samples of symptomatic patients and mosquito samples, and destroying breeding sites. But they had no idea about the virus’s presence. The Hindu spoke to two health workers attached to the AMC, and both said the authorities never mentioned Zika to them.

Dr. Kamlesh Upadhyaya, professor of medicine in BJ Medical College and chief physician of the Gujarat State Rapid Response Team, admits he was unaware about the Zika cases. But he thinks the intentions behind the secrecy were good: “It was not a respiratory disease like H1N1. There was no need to spread panic.” Bhanbhai Patel, former councillor from the area, says that despite his formidable network, he knew nothing about the outbreak. “What’s this state secret about zika” he asks.

A public health expert from Gandhinagar says the deliberate secrecy is criminal: “Gujarat has had a history of panic in the past with plague, chikungunya, etcetera. But we have lost so many months for preparedness.” He pointed out that though Brazil had the Olympics coming up, “it followed all protocols.” If Indian government thought Zika would harm the Vibrant Gujarat summit, he said, it showed that they cared more for foreigners than the lives of their own people.