By Wendell W. Solomons reporting for Sri Lanka Guardian(October, 18, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Crude oil climbed steeply from $22 (in year 2000) to $88 per barrel (in October 2007). In South Asia where petroleum is an imported input, the four-fold increase has escalated consumer prices.
Dismaying price escalation contributes to prostration in vulnerable societies. "How does one make the customer pay more when money is short?" Managers cope by increasing prices and then withdrawing. Apathy and inertia encrust the bake.
In these difficult times, a wave of Chikungunya virus has erupted. The virus enters the bloodstream through the bite of the Aedes mosquito, the primary host. Observers add a suspicion that the virus can be transmitted onwards from a sick person by the common Culex mosquito and by close contact.
The pains immobilise the body, especially through the joints of the legs. An onset of fatigue keeps the victim from attending to work for weeks or months. Damage caused to blood cells by the invading virus leads to a weakening of body systems that may trigger life-threatening complications.
The Indian Ocean island of La RĂ©union gives us a troublesome forecast for the region. By year 2006, 40% of the population of this French overseas territory was infected and more than 200 death certificates list Chikungunya as one of the causes of fatality.
About India, a complaint on the Net claims, "the government pays scant attention to the outbreak." Such an experience is not unique. Polio, previously a scourge, received attention because President Franklin D Roosevelt was seen in a wheel chair. This created commonconsensus in the 1940's and a focus on research. Through the research, Sabin and Salk vaccines were popularised.
Chikungunya virus needs the attention not only of governments but also of voluntary organisations both in the region and overseas. Examples of such work are available: today the WHO conducts training workshops in Sri Lanka to demonstrate how leprosy was eradicated in the island through participative effort in the 1990's.
On Chikungunya, network media sources have not yet carried reports on the work of US epidemiologists such as Dr. William McD. Hammon, Dr. Scott B. Halstead and Dr. E.J. Gangarosa who were funded for research in Thailand from 1962-1963. Yet, the U.S. military did join up to publish in 2006 an analysis of the relationship of Chikungunya to South American types of alpha virus (American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 75[3], 2006, pp. 461-469).
For a preventive vaccine, US military stocks such as type TSI-GSD-218 may represent the only supplies that could be rapidly replicated to protect South Asia's manpower from a biological weapon of mass destruction: India was forecast to ameliorate its standard of living through economic productivity like China (where the vector for virus is a bird.) Arms Race biological warfare agents were also developed by Russia but they may not include a vaccine for the tropical ailment. The missing vaccine also poses a threat to Australian, Canadian, French, German and other staff on duty in the Indian Ocean area, in South East Asia and in Africa.
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