Zika and Climate Change

WE SPEND, in the Christian tradition, a fair amount of time meditating on Mary as she waited to give birth.

But maybe this month it would be a good idea to meditate on the millions of women around Latin America and the Caribbean who are waiting to give birth—and doing so in a state of quiet panic.

Health ministers in countries such as Jamaica, Colombia, and Brazil were telling their (enormous) populations to avoid becoming pregnant. To avoid reproduction. To avoid the most basic task of any species. In El Salvador, the health minister said it would be at least 2018 before it would be safe to get pregnant. Think about that.

The culprit is a new disease, the Zika virus, which is mainly spread by mosquitos.

Not quite new, actually—it was found in Africa decades ago. But it’s migrated to South America, perhaps during soccer’s 2014 World Cup. And it appears to be having an entirely new effect. Though innocuous enough to those who catch it (flu-like symptoms so mild that most people don’t even know they have it), it appears linked to a truly horrendous set of birth defects. In a normal year, Brazil has a couple of hundred cases of microcephaly, an incurable birth defect that may result in intellectual disabilities, seizures, and reduced life expectancy. In 2015, that number suddenly jumped to 4,000, and the best guess is that the Zika virus is the culprit.

The disease spread very quickly through the Americas. By late January the Centers for Disease Control had listed 24 nations where they were warning Americans not to travel, at least if they had any intention of becoming pregnant. United Airlines announced refunds for any traveler with a ticket in the “Zika zone.” A kind of epidemiological apartheid was suddenly underway.

This disease is, in no small part, the result of the warming world we’ve built by our carbon emissions. As Scientific American explained, the hot, wet world we’ve created dramatically increases mosquito habitat—warmer temperatures broaden the geographic range of insects that carry deadly diseases. Paolo Zanotto, a virologist at the University of São Paulo’s Biomedical Sciences Institute studying the Zika virus, put it this way: “The number of mosquitoes is increasing, their area of activity is increasing...Global warming is probably collaborating with its spread to previously free areas.” A Yale researcher added that “the direct effects of temperature increase are an increase in immature mosquito development, virus development, and mosquito biting rates, which increase contact rates (biting) with humans.”

As usual, the people bearing most of the burden are those who have done the least to cause the problem—your average El Salvadoran produces very little in the way of carbon emissions. And this burden is almost unbearable—imagine, again, what it’s like to be pregnant, too poor for testing, and terrified that your baby will be born with this birth defect.

Across the region governments are doing what they can—at this writing, Brazil had 220,000 troops in the field, turning over flowerpots and emptying tires of standing water to deprive mosquitoes of breeding grounds. But as the health minister said, “we are losing badly” in the fight.

Those of us who helped cause the problem have a moral obligation to provide all the help we can—and even more to make sure that we rein in climate change with all possible speed, so that the train of emergent diseases (West Nile, chikungunya, now Zika) tail off instead of gaining new steam.

Climate change is long past the stage of threat. It’s now sinister and sad, and it demands action like nothing our generations have ever faced.