Rhesus Monkey 766 is about to become a celebrity in the worst of places: a medical journal. Her fever, the pinkeye she’s gotten, the stiffness in her movement, are the symptoms of a virus that is yet to be described. It’s 1947 in the forests near Entebbe and late last December in the bars on my street. But the question is the same, “Have you heard about Zika?”
The city of Neiva is recovering from our summertime epidemics. We compare how long joint-pain kept us in bed or how many days of fever Chikungunya gave us. Dengue, and the haemorrhagic shock that can follow, are here too, spread by the same species of mosquito. And leaving aside its drying river, the newly stagnant canal, its poor standard of healthcare, Neiva is even at risk from its construction industry.
A dashboard thermometer hits and passes forty at midday. And houses, as was prudent, were built to accommodate the heat. By every window and above each door, open vents were placed. Even in the most expensive flats, it is impossible to keep out insects.
While a vaccine is in production for both viruses, it seems unlikely that it will reach the poorest here, who live, predictably, in corrugated shacks by the river. So it was with relief that the latest disease to reach us was mild. Four days of fever: a shortcut through Chikungunya.
We hadn’t heard of Microcephaly or Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Brazil was yet to experience the 4,000 birth defects that have come with its latest pandemic. Alejandro Gaviria Uribe, Colombia’s health minister, was busy elsewhere; the idea that he might recommend that couples delay conceiving, or that pregnant women would be discouraged from traveling to Latin America, would have been met with the usual ridicule.
Looking underdressed beside the grand international papers, an article is printed in Neiva’s weekly. We are months before Brazilian maternity wards, or a Zika-linked rise in autoimmune disease, will feature in the Huffington Post. Its headline: Worries over Teenage Pregnancy in Neiva.
Women younger than nineteen account for a quarter of the city’s pregnancies. This, as the article makes clear, is a 7.3% increase on previous years. Though nationwide rates of teenage pregnancy have fallen since 2012, the figure for Colombia remains 52 births per 1000 individuals. The United Kingdom, having the highest rate of adolescent pregnancy in Western Europe, sits at a rate of 15 births per 1000 individuals.
While more than 60% of British teenage pregnancies end in abortion, this, for many Colombians, is either illegal or unthinkable, and even the caveat of “severe and life-threatening malformation of the foetus” requires the approval of both a judge and doctor.
The lack of viable contraception, the age of so many involved, and a year that promises further economic instability, threaten to overwhelm maternity care. Solutions include the destruction of the vector of both Zika and Chikungunya, Aedes aegypti. Genetically modified mosquitos, producing sterile offspring, have already been released in Brazil, Panamá, and the Cayman Islands. Traditional insecticides are in use throughout Peru. And the destruction of mosquito breeding sites, whether in Neiva’s waterways or at the base of my shower, can be effective on a local scale.
But netting, and often only long-sleeved shirts, remain the only defence for many Colombians. Even after these measures, what remains is the striking unfairness of a virus that, for most, is no worse than a four-day fever, and for some will bring lifelong disability.
