Colombia links deaths to Zika virus

BOGOTA, Saturday

The mosquito-borne Zika virus sweeping through Latin America has claimed three lives in Colombia, as the United Nations urged increased access to abortion because of fears of severe birth defects.

In the first direct statements from government health officials blaming Zika for causing deaths, Colombia’s National Health Institute (INS) said the patients died after contracting the virus and developing a rare neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Cases of the syndrome — in which the immune system attacks the nervous system, causing weakness and sometimes paralysis — have increased in tandem with the Zika outbreak, fuelling suspicions that it is a complication of the otherwise mild tropical fever, which is also blamed for causing brain damage in babies born to infected mothers.

“Other cases of deaths linked to Zika are going to emerge,” said epidemiologist Martha Lucia Ospina, director of the INS.

“The world is realising that Zika can be deadly. The mortality rate is not very high, but it can be deadly.”

Most Guillain-Barre patients recover, but the syndrome sometimes causes paralysis or death.

Citing the rise in babies born with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads and brains, the UN human rights office urged countries hit by Zika to give women access to contraception and abortion.

Women’s reproductive rights are a touchy subject in largely Catholic Latin America, but the UN said countries urging women to avoid pregnancy — a list that comprises Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Jamaica and Panama — had to give them ways to control their fertility.

“How can they ask these women not to become pregnant, but not offer... the possibility to stop their pregnancies?” the UN agency’s spokeswoman Cecile Pouilly told journalists.