The Zika Virus and the Next Pandemic
ZAKARIA: The Zika virus is spreading explosively says the World Health Organization. It is a pandemic in progress says America's top infectious disease doctor. This once obscure virus is now found in a wide swath of the Americas well over 20 countries or territories in all according to the CDC. It is believed that for most people the virus is a minor medical hiccup but the CDC has warned pregnant women not to travel to the danger zone. Why? Because there is an association doctors are still investigating between Zika and a sometimes deadly birth disorder called microcephaly, where babies are born with abnormally small heads. Joining me now to help us understand the big picture is Sonia Shah, author and investigative reporter. Her next book is called "Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond." It comes out next month. Pleasure to have you on, Sonia.</s>SONIA SHAH, AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST: Thanks for having me.</s>ZAKARIA: So can this spread to the United States?</s>SHAH: Yes, and it probably will. We've already had other viruses that are carried by the same mosquitoes that are present in the United States. So it's prettily likely that it will take hold in the U.S. at some point.</s>ZAKARIA: But when you look at things like dengue and other mosquito borne illnesses, they don't spread like wildfire in the U.S. the way they do in South America, why?</s>SHAH: Well, the places where -- Americans don't live in as crowded cities as in, say, northern Brazil. That's one part of it. So in the places where we have these vectors, these mosquitoes that carry the diseases, people don't live that closely together, so we have fewer people in those places for one thing. But it's also the way that we live. You know, we have electricity so we have air conditioning, so we go inside, we have screens on our doors and on our windows and we're protected from mosquito bites. So in all these ways where our lifestyles are such that we don't get as exposed to mosquito bites as people like, say, poor people in a Brazilian slum might be.</s>ZAKARIA: But sometimes strange things cause these diseases to spread. You point out that the houses crisis in Florida actually help dengue spread. Explain why.</s>SHAH: During the foreclosure crisis we had a lot of abandoned homes. And because that's Florida, that meant a lot of empty swimming pools and gardens, and when the rains came they filled up with standing water, and they became giant mosquito hatchery. So essentially no one was home to notice and no one was home to let in the mosquito inspectors and then of course a year later we had the first epidemic of dengue in Florida and 5 percent of the population of Key West was found to have been exposed.</s>ZAKARIA: El Salvador has told its people, its women, not to get pregnant for the next two years. Many other South American countries have issued similar kinds of warnings, though not quite as extreme. Is this an overreaction?</s>SHAH: At this point, I don't know that it is. I mean, we don't know enough about the connection between Zika virus and this horrible birth defect. And the other problem is we can't really surveil for it very well because you can't really tell if you have it until it's kind of too late to do the best test. Right? so you have -- you can see if you have it within the first five days of infection, but you don't have symptoms then so you're going to be unlikely to go out and see if you have it anyway and do the blood test. So we don't have a good way to track this disease and then of course we don't have any treatments for it or any prevent -- you know, any vaccine for it. So it's really going to be nine months later when you have the baby that you'd realize that I had -- you know, that this thing had happened to you. So at this point not getting pregnant, you know, it's really -- it's an incredible public health warning. I haven't heard of anything like that before. And we think of pandemics as causing death rates to go up. But in this case, this could be a pandemic that actually has sort of an opposite effect which is, you know, birth rates might fall.</s>ZAKARIA: You know, so this is all happening in part because of globalization, trade, travel, people moving around. And you see I think you point out there are 300 brand new infections in the last 50 years. What's the solution? Because we -- we're not going to stop, we're not going to wind back that clock and not travel, and you know, goods are going to be moving from place to place. What should we be doing?</s>SHAH: Well, we need to do a lot better surveillance for one thing. Now we can't know which pathogen is going to cause the next sort of big epidemic. But we do know where these things -- are more likely to happen because we know how it happens. So we know that in places where there's rapid urbanization and a lot of slums, intensive livestock production, a lot of air con connections, all of these different ways in which these pathogens can emerge, we know that's how it happens. So we can look at a map and we can see, well, where are the hot spots where this is most likely to occur and we can do intense surveillance in those places. And people are already starting to do that in sort of ad hoc way. But I think that's something we really are going to need to step up in the future.</s>ZAKARIA: And do we need to in countries like the United States, developed countries that would be the recipients here have a different kind of public health investment and response?</s>SHAH: I think so. I mean, right now we usually have a kind of bio medical response to these disease outbreaks and that is to kind of isolate the cause and, you know, the mosquito in this case, or the virus and kind of surgically target it with the chemicals and drugs, but what we're seeing with a lot of these new diseases is that they're moving from wildlife into human populations or livestock into human populations. They're being driven forward by social and political factors, large scale diffused environmental factors, so we really need sort of a collaborative approach. You know, we need veterinarians, wildlife biologists, social scientists, political scientists, as well as our bio medical experts to really come together to start a much more collaborative approach to solving these health crises.</s>ZAKARIA: And the stakes are very high. Sonia Shah, thank you so much.</s>SHAH: Thank you.</s>ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, we all know the French have incredible wine and great cheese. But what about their tech start-ups? Really? Find out how this bastion of socialism and leisure might be becoming the Silicon Valley of Europe.