Biosecurity

The Zika 'crisis': Another result of DDT ban

A Zika vaccine would likely be a live virus, and all live virus vaccines are contraindicated in pregnancy – and possibly while nursing. That includes measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, shingles and rotavirus. There is a case report of a nursing infant who got meningoencephalitis, probably from yellow fever vaccine virus. Nursing Labrador puppies got canine distemper, a relative of measles, after their mother got a booster shot.

WHO and CDC are quick to indict Zika virus, which might eventually turn out to be an innocent bystander. But the chief culprit is known: a breakdown in vector control.

In 1970, the safest and most effective public health weapon in history – DDT – was banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the 1990s, Mexico agreed to abandon its DDT program as a condition of NAFTA. Mosquitoes travel.

Alarm about Zika will be a public-relations exercise, covering the waste of countless human lives and billions of dollars on ineffective or harmful campaigns, if it does not open a discussion of why diseases on their way out in the 1970s are coming back now.