The USA has now eased its December 2018 travel advisory for India over Zika outbreak, especially for pregnant women. Centre for Disease Control (CDC), a US health protection agency, had earlier warned pregnant women not to travel to India as there was an ongoing outbreak in the states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
On April 1, 2019, the Indian Council of Medical Research said its December rebuttal to CDC’s earlier advisory has convinced the international agency to declar the status of Zika outbreak has changed to “current or past transmission but no current outbreak” from “ongoing outbreak” – the former status given to all south Asian nations. Additionally, the revised CDC advisory puts all countries in the clear from having an “ongoing outbreak”.
However, it is not immediately clear if this rebuttal was actually behind this change.
The CDC advisory now states, “We do not have accurate information on the current level of risk. There may be delays in detection and reporting of new outbreaks. Since Zika is a cause of severe birth defects, CDC recommends pregnant women and couples planning for a pregnancy within the next three months work with their health care providers to carefully consider the risks and possible consequences of travel to areas with risk of Zika. If you travel, you should take all precautionary measures and avoid mosquito bites.”
Further the ICMR compares that Zika virus outbreak in Rajasthan with the one in Brazil, which encountered a massive outbreak in 2016. Again it clarifies that though preliminary studies done on strain in Rajasthan do suggest that the mutation causing microcephaly (birth defects) was absent there, still further characterisation of the strain is required as microcephaly has several attributable cases.
The statement is quite a divergent from the stand taken by ICMR earlier. It had almost ruled out the possibility of microcephaly in Rajasthan. So it was also questioned by several experts, who had termed it detrimental to public health.
ICMR also intimated about a study that was being carried out in Madhya Pradesh among Zika-positive pregnant women to aware them about the outcomes of pregnancy and neurological complications, including microcephaly. A similar study has been rolled out in Rajasthan as well, said ICMR.
As per reports, earlier the government doctors had persuasively aborted the foetuses of Zika-positive pregnant women in the affected areas.
