As Zika continues to bite Singapore, from 0 to 242 cases in ten days, the anxiety around the virus in India is surging too.
A new study in the medical journal, The Lancet, tries to predict where the Zika virus will make an appearance next. Will it be China? Hong Kong has already reported its first Zika case. Africa – the original ‘home’ of the virus? Or India, with its billion-plus population, a shabby public healthcare system, robust travel to Singapore, and favorable climate for the aides Egypt mosquito to breed?
Whatever be the course of the virus, remember that Zika is no dengue or Ebola. Also, a look back at major health outbreaks in the last seven years shows that scientists have been enormously wrong about disease predictions.
Ebola, MERS, and H1N1 We’re All Touted To Wipe Out Humanity – What Happened?
Disease predictions are based on mathematical models- the accuracy will be as good as the numbers fed into it. But in the case of new viruses, the speed of spread and the scale of mortality are key numbers known only years after an outbreak, and these missing links result in statistics that are way off the mark Sky Birds.
Case in point:
1. H1N1 – April 2009
The World Health Organisation (WHO) softened its very definition of a pandemic a little before the spread of H1N1, eliminating the need for a virus to cause “enormous morbidity and death” and said in as many words that the virus “could threaten humanity”.
It was even accused by many, including the former head of health at the Council for Europe for “being under the influence of the industry and faking the pandemic.”
The former head of health at the Council for Europe was among the many credible experts to accuse the WHO of “faking” the pandemic.
2. MERS – May 2013
The World Health Organisation called MERS or the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome with a 50 to 60% fatality rate a “threat to the entire world” – at that time, the “deadly virus” had killed 27 people in the Middle East, mostly Saudi Arabia.
Margaret Chan, the WHO’s Head said at an annual meeting, “ We understand too little about this virus when viewed against the magnitude of its potential threat. We do not know where the virus hides in nature. We do not know how people are getting infected. Until we answer these questions, we are empty-handed when it comes to prevention. These are alarm bells. And we must respond.”
Since 2012, when MERS was first detected, the virus killed 102 people in Saudi Arabia and about 30 in South Korea when it spread in 2015.
