Some scientists say that French authorities did not do enough to stop the spread of the Zika virus after a significant outbreak of the disease in French Polynesia in 2013-2014, reports FRANCE 24.
Dr. Didier Musso, who co-authored several papers about the dangers of Zika during the 2013-2014 outbreak, says that French authorities did not take findings by doctors in the French overseas territory seriously enough.
“In 2014 and 2013, the outbreak of Zika [in French Polynesia] went unnoticed in mainland France,” Musso told Le Point in February. “We managed on our own to isolate the virus, update the diagnostic tests, treat the patients and deal with the first severe medical complications, which no one expected.”
The current Zika epidemic in Latin America, where more than 1.5 million people have been infected, is thought to have been transmitted by international travelers from French Polynesia, a French overseas territory in the South Pacific made up of 118 islands, including Tahiti and Bora Bora.
Scientists say the virus sequences of the strains in Brazil and the Pacific are nearly identical.
The Zika outbreak in French Polynesia was the most widespread up to that point. It affected up to 28,000 people, and more than 10 percent of the local population reported symptoms.
Zika then spread from French Polynesia to New Caledonia (France), the Cook Islands (New Zealand) and Easter Island (Chile).
Musso, along with Sophie Ioos, Henri Pierre Mallet, Van-Mai Cao-Lormeau and other doctors at the Institut Louis Malardé and the Institut de Veille Sanitaire in Tahiti, were some of the first to report that Zika was not a “benign” disease as previously thought. In late 2013 they linked Zika to Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can cause paralysis and, in some cases, death.