Perfect Climate for Zika Virus

02/15/2016 - 09h57

One thing which has been widely discussed in this frenzy following the zika epidemics is that the range of the virus is a direct consequence of global warming. Global warming may have contributed, but we are still very far from making a direct connection between both facts.

The logic behind that hypothesis is the focus on the Aedes aegypti mosquito. After all, the mosquito does need at least two things to reproduce: water and heat.

With climate change, both factors are likely to become more abundant in several parts of the world. The rise in the average temperature could help to increase the distribution of the mosquito across the planet as the amount of rainfall increases (more heat leads to more evaporation and more rainfall.)

However, not all that makes sense and seems verisimilar is true. It has to be proven.

Although many environmentalists believe in such hypothesis - which is very convenient to dramatize their cause, declaring it to be confirmed on social networks and elsewhere is not very different from attributing the cause of the epidemics to transgenic food, larvicides or vaccines. Let's not jump to conclusions.

We cannot deny that the Aedes aegypti mosquito has spread across the planet with the help of global warming, but other factors also had major importance, such as the increase in trade and foreign travel. Without airplanes, neither the mosquito nor infected people would travel so quickly to every corner of the planet.

Zika has spread in places like Brazil because the mosquito had already settled here – quite well, by the way. It disseminated dengue, which infected 1.5 million people and killed 800 in 2015.

It is true that the sharp increase in the number of cases of microcephaly associated to the cases of zika leads to a terrifying perspective, especially in the individual scale. In the social scale, however, public health authorities must worry especially with dengue.

But who has the means and the courage to adopt more ambitious goals to universalize basic sanitation in Brazil? The U.S. has the Aedes aegypti mosquito and cases of dengue, and now zika as well, but there are no epidemics.

In Brazil, where there is a lot of open sewage and many people need to stock up water, in addition to the little air conditioning and the few screens on doors and windows, it is easier to promise the impossible (vaccines against zika in one year) and blame global warming for our failure as a civilized society.

It doesn't cost anything. Only further delays.

Translated by THOMAS MUELLO

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