India faces its biggest outbreak of Zika virus

• On 9 October, officials from the Department of Health of Rajasthan confirmed that there had been 29 verified cases of Zika virus in the state.
  
• The first case of Zika was reported on September 23 in an 85-year-old patient at the Sawai Man Singh Hospital. Jaipur.
  
• The virus, which is transmitted by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, causes fever and rashes. It is particularly harmful for pregnant women because it can cause microcephaly in newborns.

India has seen its fair share of epidemic scared in recent years.

At the end of 2014, the Ebola virus, which plagued West Africa for most of the second half of the year, reached New Delhi when a man tested positive for the disease after landing from Liberia. In 2017, three people in Gujarat were tested positive for the Zika virus, which spread across South America in 2015 and 2016, affecting pregnant women. Earlier this year, in June, the state of Kerala was in a state of alert after the death of 17 people of the Nipah virus, which is transmitted by the bat.

Last month, the Zika virus resurfaced and this time it quickly became the largest epidemic ever recorded in India. On October 9, officials from the Rajasthan Health Department confirmed the existence of 29 verified cases of Zika virus in that state. As a result of this news, the central government's Ministry of Health attempted to allay fears by claiming that the epidemic was under control.

The first case of Zika was reported on
September 23, in an 85-year-old patient at the Sawai Man Singh Hospital in Jaipur. The virus, which is transmitted by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, causes fever and rashes. It is particularly harmful for pregnant women because it can cause microcephaly in newborns.

The majority of current cases are confined to a particular area in Jaipur-Shastri Nagar. Since the first case was reported, the state government of Rajasthan said that it had tried to limit the damage while monitoring the magnitude of the problem. He has placed more than 90 pregnant women under surveillance, controlled 26,000 households and destroyed 29,000 mosquito breeding sites in the locality, according to Veenu Gupta, secretary at the Ministry of Health.

For its part, the central government also sent a team to Jaipur, staffed by the national vector-borne disease control program, to monitor the situation and help government officials. About five laboratories have been installed throughout the state to analyze blood samples from patients suspected of contracting the virus.