Zika's Unborn Victims

As India fights its first Zika outbreak, BANJOT KAUR travels to the virus-hit districts of VIDISHA and BHOPAL in MADHYA PRADESH and finds a grievously unprepared response system

- 

We were in two minds when we went to the block hospital. The gynaecologist checked my blood report and repeated the advise of abortion. Out of sheer scare, I got the foetus aborted then and there

MADHVI SHARMA, 37, is three-month pregnant and distraught. On November 5, officials from the nearby Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Hospital came to her house in Madhya Pradesh’s Vidisha district. They were on a surveillance after Zika cases were reported from Sironj—the block where Madhvi lives. The team was particularly targeting pregnant women because Zika can deform foetuses. On finding she was pregnant, they collected her blood sample. Ten days later, block medical officer R L Dinkar and a paediatrician from the hospital came and told her she had Zika and must undergo an abortion if she did not want to have a deformed baby. Madhvi’s first two children— both girls—are differently abled and her third child—a boy—had died within hours after birth.

Officials also advised Neeta Sahu, who lives in the same locality as Madhvi, to undergo abortion. She did so on November 26. Did the officials overreact in advising abortion?

India is in the middle of its first major Zika outbreak. Between September 22 and November 27, a total of 289 people have been found Zika positive in Madhya Pradesh (130) and Rajasthan (159)—the only two states with confirmed cases. Since fatality in Zika is just 8.3 per cent, as per a 2017 paper in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, governments have not taken steps to deal with the virus. It was always known to cause mild fever, and was less dangerous than even dengue and chikungunya viruses, which are also carried by the same