In an address to the World Health Assembly Monday, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan spoke strongly on the two major reasons as root causes of the ongoing Zika crisis.
The two major reasons she claimed are:
1. Countries "dropped the ball" on mosquito control in the 1970s and called the ending of effective control practices a "massive policy failure."
2. Family planning and sex education failures illustrated an "extreme consequence" of the disease, as causal links between the mosquito-borne virus and microcephaly, a condition which results in babies being born with severe brain abnormalities, become scientific consensus.
"The possibility that a mosquito bite during pregnancy could be linked to severe brain abnormalities in newborns alarmed the public and astonished scientists," she told the Assembly, the supreme decision-making body of the WHO, in Geneva.
The virus causes microcephaly and Guillain-Barre syndrome, a condition which attacks nerve cells in the victim's nervous system and can lead to paralysis, the WHO confirmed in April.
Latin American and the Caribbean have the highest proportion of unintended pregnancies globally, she said.
'The world is not prepared to cope'
The CNN Live reports, lambasting failures to prepare for global outbreaks with forward-thinking policies like ongoing mosquito control, she said that all the organization could do to protect women of childbearing age is "offer advice. Avoid mosquito bites. Delay pregnancy. Do not travel to areas with ongoing transmission."
She said that increased cases of dengue, chikungunya and Zika were evidence of a "dramatic resurgence" from emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, exacerbated by urbanization and the excellent conditions for outbreaks that this population movement presents.
"For infectious diseases, you cannot trust the past when planning for the future... The world is not prepared to cope."
She added that "in an interconnected world... few threats to health are local anymore."
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