For the past two months it’s been nearly impossible to turn on a television without getting bombarded by dire reports about the Zika virus now afflicting South and Central America.
Television loves a mystery virus.
Dr. Aisha Thomas-St. Cyr, an infectious disease expert at the Sebastian River Medical Center, jokes that apparently “we all want to panic and face a zombie apocalypse,” but quickly adds that in her opinion, the Zika virus isn’t it.
2014’s Ebola virus came much closer to that mark.
The World Health Organization says that in 2014, 70 percent of all reported Ebola cases were fatal. That amounted to 11,326 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
So far, the Zika virus has been far less deadly, and Dr. Thomas-St. Cyr says a major outbreak in Indian River County is unlikely, in any case.
Estimates are that in Brazil, the supposed epicenter of the current Zika virus outbreak, up to a 1.5 million people may have been infected but as of Feb. 11, the Washington Post reported only three Brazilian adults had died as a result of those infections.
That’s an infinitesimally small number in the world of infectious diseases.
In fact, most infectious disease experts agree with Thomas-St. Cyr when she points out that only 1-in-5 people infected with the Zika virus will even show any symptoms of an infection, much less die from one.
Further deflating the hysteria balloon, Thomas-St. Cyr points out that while many questions about Zika do need to be answered, it’s not actually a mystery virus.
“It’s an old virus,” she says, “It’s been around since the 1940s.”
First discovered in the Zika Forest near Lake Victoria in Uganda during post-war research into Yellow Fever, the virus has been relatively benign in East Africa.
As Public Radio International reports, “The mosquitoes that most often carry Zika in Uganda prefer to prey on monkeys rather than humans and are poorly adapted to human environments.” In this hemisphere, it seems a different species of mosquitoes, better adapted to urban living, may be spreading the virus more effectively to humans, but the death rate remains statistically insignificant.
How the virus made it all the way across the breadth of the African continent (roughly 4,000 miles) and then across the Atlantic ocean (another 1,800 miles where the continents are closest) to Central and South America is unknown.
Thomas-St. Cyr says there’s no vaccine available – nor is there likely to be in the near future – but common sense and avoiding mosquito bites in the areas of active transmission make an outbreak here unlikely.
“It’s a vector-borne disease,” explains the doctor with a lilting Caribbean accent, “You need to have the mosquito. You need to have an infected person. You need that mosquito to bite that infected person and then transmit (the virus) to someone else.”
That, Thomas-St. Cyr concludes, is unlikely here at this point. “You should be cautious, obviously, but I’m not seeing a widespread pandemic of local transmission occurring. That’s not what I’m predicting.”
Early reports that the virus can cause microcephaly or abnormally small head size in newborn infants has raised heightened concerns for pregnant women, and Thomas-St. Cyr advises pregnant women to be especially cautious.
The fear is that a woman who contracts the infection from a mosquito bite or in some other way might transmit it to her unborn child, and that the infected fetus would develop abnormally.
However, there is no hard scientific proof at this point to support the theory of in-utero transmission and microcephaly.
For instance, it has also been reported that it is exposure to chemicals used to eradicate mosquitoes that causes microcephaly in infants, not the Zika virus itself.
Nevertheless, Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the World Health Organization’s Zika response unit says “at this time the virus is considered guilty until proven innocent.”
Of the 10 to 12 Zika cases in pregnant women reported in the U.S. so far this year, every one appears to have been contracted while traveling abroad.
That raises another area of concern: Even if Indian County residents are at low risk of contracting the disease here, anyone who travels to South America – to attend the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, for instance – clearly will face a higher risk of being bitten by a Zika-bearing mosquito. As long as the disease remains as benign as it has so far, the added risk doesn’t seem too daunting.
The CDC finally put “boots on the ground” in Brazil for the first time last week to collect more data and conduct more tests to unravel the mystery of just how dangerous the Zika virus is, but it’s unlikely any definitive results will announced soon.
Dr. Aisha Thomas-St. Cyr is an infectious disease specialist with Sebastian ID Care at 7955 Bay Street in Sebastian, next to the hospital. The phone number is 772-388-9155.
