Abortion is no answer to the threat of Zika
SIR – Your article on Zika (News Focus, February 5) raises some important issues, not least your welcome emphasis on the importance of good public health measures. The same mosquito that spreads Zika spreads dengue and chikungunya fever, and we are highly unlikely to see it take hold in the UK. Hype from some sources about the very small risk here obscures the fact that the burden of these diseases falls mostly on the poorest countries, even with sexual transmission now appearing in the US and Europe. The oft-rehearsed rhetoric about abortion laws in affected countries risks obscuring the issues you highlight further. Whether one sees abortion as never, sometimes or always permissible, equating it with a prevention measure is simplistic and comes too late. Our most prominent answer to reducing child death and malformation from German measles is vaccination, not abortion. So why is abortion hailed as an answer here? It doesn’t seem to me to stack up from any public health analysis of how to handle Zika. Even though a vaccine for Zika is not exactly near, there are numerous other control strategies governments could and should select before we leap to abortion. Previous mosquito eradication schemes in South America have had an impact, as recent articles in both Science and New Scientist have highlighted. What we need is effective public health action with the World Health Organisation getting its act together faster than its woefully slow response to Ebola. Our duty is solidarity to prevent avoidable disease. On public health grounds alone, abortion is not a convincing public health answer to a preventable disease, whatever you think of the morality of it. Yours faithfully, Jim McManus Director of Public Health, Hertfordshire County Council, Hertford
