Samoa questioning zika travel advice

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Photo: AFP

The Ministry of Health in Samoa is questioning travel warnings issued to pregnant women in New Zealand and the United States over the mosquito borne zika virus.

Only a few cases of the disease, which may cause birth defects, were reported in Samoa and other Pacific nations last year.

Ben Robinson reports.

The Director General of Health in Samoa, Dr Take Naseri, says just three cases of Zika were detected in Samoa in 2015 and the travel warnings were issued without consultation.

"Nobody has even verified our status. If you look at the numbers the last positive specimen was arouind October. Now if there is an epidemic going on, we would have seen cases week after week, day after day. Putting Samoa there as one of the most dangerous places for Zika is, in my own personal opinion, not right when we only had three cases. And those three cases may be false positive."

Dr Naseri says an ongoing programme to control the mosquito which carries both the zika and dengue viruses appears to be working.

"We were doing a lot of vector control, especially source reduction was very aggressive. Destroying all the breeding sites. Especially the areas that are densely populated and even the areas of of hotels, our points of entry like the wharves and airports. Even the hospitals and the schools."

The zika virus, which causes mild flu like symptoms, was first detected in the Pacific in 2007.

More than a 100,000 people are thought to have contracted the virus during an outbreak in French Polynesia in 2013, but the territory says just 18 instances of the birth defect, microcephaly, could be linked to the virus.

About 4,000 cases of zika-linked microcephaly have been recorded in Brazil since October, where affected children were born with unusually small heads.

In Fiji, the National Advisor on Communicable diseases, Dr Mike Kama, says efforts to prevent zika have been ramped up despite only two cases in the country last year.

"So what we've done is scale up our surveillance system and gather more than enough samples of patients presenting with illnesses which show Zika the same symptoms: Chikungunya, Zika and also Dengue. We send them off to our reference laboratory and hope they can routinely test for the three conditions."

There have been no cases of zika in the Cook Islands since an outbreak in 2014.

The Cook Islands director of Public Health, Dr Neti Herman, says as well as checking every house for mosquito breeding sights, her government is monitoring visitors from Pacific countries where zika is reported.

"At the same time we are providing pamphlets to our visitors, mainly to make them aware of the symptoms so they can report to the hospital or the health clinic to be attended to. We're not taking things lightly because Zika is in our Pacific region."

The World Health Organisation is not recommending any travel restrictions related to zika, but the Ministry of Health in New Zealand says pregnant women should avoid travelling to countries where the virus has been reported.