WHO steps up response to microcephaly surge in Zika-hit areas

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is taking steps to get a better grasp of the spike in children born with small heads amid the Zika virus spread in the Americas, officials from the UN health agency said in Geneva on Tuesday.

An Aedes Aegypti mosquito is photographed on human skin in a lab of the International Training and Medical Research Training Center.

The rise in malformations, and the risk that Zika might spread beyond the Americas, caused the UN health agency to declare a global health emergency on Monday.

"We need data and to set up surveillance sites in low and middle-income countries in order to see any change" in the number of babies diagnosed with abnormally small heads, said Anthony Costello, a WHO expert on the condition known as microcephaly.


WHO and authorities in Brazil, which is at the centre of the outbreak, were already "extremely active" in carrying out such monitoring, he said. While the timing and locations of microcephaly cases in Brazil have coincided with the spread of the Zika fever through mosquitoes, scientists have not yet been able to establish a causal link.

Costello said microcephaly had been known to be mainly related to infections with rubella and other viruses, exposure to toxins and heavy metals, genetic conditions such as Down syndrome, as well as malnutrition.

So far, only 12 of the 270 Brazilian mothers who have given birth to babies with small heads have been proved to carry the Zika virus, the WHO expert said. The virus causes only mild symptoms like fever, headache and rashes in most patients.

WHO said in Brazil there may have been 1.5 million Zika cases and that the number of cases in the Americas could grow to 4 million within 12 months.