Mexico City:
Mexico is very likely to join the list of countries to
register cases of the painful mosquito-borne viral disease chikungunya, a
senior health ministry official said on Wednesday.
Chikungunya
is spread by two mosquito species, and is typically not fatal but can
cause debilitating symptoms including fever, headache and severe joint
pain lasting months.
There is no current treatment for the virus,
which was detected for the first time in the Americas late last year,
and no licensed vaccine to prevent it.
Given that the virus has
already shown up in much of the Caribbean, Central America and the
United States, it is also likely to reach Mexico, Pablo Kuri, the deputy
health minister in charge of disease prevention, told Reuters.
"It's
very probable that at some point, we'll have confirmed cases of
chikungunya," he said, noting that six cases have already been detected,
but those people had contracted the virus in the Caribbean and El
Salvador.
He said that Mexico is home to the mosquito species that carries the virus, adding to the likelihood of its arrival.
"There's no reason we shouldn't have chikungunya in Mexico," Kuri said.
Last
month, El Salvador said it had detected nearly 30,000 cases of the
virus. In the United States, locally transmitted infections - as opposed
to infections in Americans traveling abroad - were reported for the
first time this year.
Chikungunya, a virus more commonly found in
Africa and Asia and transmitted by the same daytime-biting aedes
aegypti mosquito that causes the more deadly dengue fever, was first
detected in the eastern Caribbean at the start of 2014.
© Thomson Reuters 2014
Story First Published: October 16, 2014 06:17 IST
