Emergency meeting on Zika virus to be held Monday

The World Health Organization will hold an emergency meeting Monday to find ways to curb the Zika virus, which is linked to birth defects and "spreading explosively" throughout the Americas.

The WHO could classify the Zika outbreak as a "public health emergency of international concern," which would require a coordinated global response.

That would also "direct many more resources to containing the outbreak,"  said Amesh Adalja, a senior associate at the Center for Health Security at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. If an emergency is declared, "there is a legal duty to respond promptly to contain the outbreak."

Another purpose of Monday's meeting is to make sure nations don’t take inappropriate steps to limit travel or trade because of the virus, said Bruce Aylward, assistant director-general of the WHO. During the Ebola outbreak, many countries closed their borders, which harmed the fragile economies of West Africa.

The Zika virus is spread through mosquitoes, like malaria or West Nile Virus. It does not spread directly from person to person. Four out of five people with Zika virus have no symptoms, according to the WHO. Those who do develop symptoms typically have mild effects, such as a low fever, rash, joint pain, pink eye and headaches.

The WHO is concerned about a link between the virus, first diagnosed in the Western Hemisphere in May, and a spike in cases of microcephaly, a birth defect in which babies are born with unusually small skulls and incomplete brain development.

The Americas could see 3 million to 4 million Zika infections a year, Sylvain Aldighieri of the Pan American Health Organization said last week.

The WHO has declared a public health emergency only three times: the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009; the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014; and a resurgence of polio in Syria and other countries in 2014. But the WHO never declared a public health emergency with other viruses, such as MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Adalja said.

The WHO should "wage war" against the Aedes mosquito, which spreads Zika virus and other infections, said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He said the WHO should appoint a "field marshall" to lead this fight.

Hotez said officials should test pools of mosquitoes to look for the Zika virus, as well as conduct blood tests among local residents to find the virus among the general population.

The WHO needs to spray insecticides and reduce standing water, where mosquitoes breed, Hotez said. Plus the agency should launch pilot studies to test experimental ways to fight the mosquito. These include genetically engineered mosquitoes to prevent breeding; a bacteria called Wolbachia, which infests insect eggs in a number of species, although not the Aedes mosquitoes that cause Zika; and giving everyone in a community a deworming medication called ivermectin, which kills any mosquitoes that bite the person taking the drug.

Researchers are already testing some of these strategies against other deadly mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever.

The WHO also should better educate women who are pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant, Hotez said.

he Zika virus outbreak has spread to 25 countries in the Americas.

Jamaica reported its first diagnosis of the Zika virus, in a four-year-old child who recently returned from Texas. It's not yet known if the child was infected in Jamaica or elsewhere.

Although 31 Americans have been diagnosed with Zika after returning from travel to the Americas, the continental USA is not considered to have a Zika outbreak, because the disease has not become entrenched in local mosquito populations.

Zika is spreading in Puerto Rico, which has had 19 cases in people who haven't traveled to outbreak zones, as well in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which has had one case of someone who hasn't traveled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.