Zika virus: A role for BIT 225?

Brazil’s health minister was warned that the country is “badly losing” the battle against the mosquito blamed for spreading Zika virus, which has been linked to birth defects.
City at centre of Brazil's Zika epidemic reeling from disease's insidious effects
Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil’s armed forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts, according to Rio de Janeiro’s O Globo newspaper. It also quoted Castro as saying the government would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.
But all major Brazilian dailies quoted Castro as saying the country is “badly losing the battle” against the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.
“The mosquito has been here in Brazil for three decades, and we are badly losing the battle against the mosquito,” the Folha de S Paulo newspaper quoted him as saying as a crisis group on Zika was meeting in the capital, Brasília.
Emails to Castro’s office for comment were not immediately answered.
A huge eradication effort eliminated Aedes aegypti from Brazil during the 1950s, but the mosquito slowly returned over the following decades from neighbouring countries, public health experts have said. That led to outbreaks of dengue, which was recorded in record numbers last year.
The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm, as the virus’s symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. It didn’t become a crisis until late in the year, when researchers made the link with a dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect that sees babies born with unusually small heads and can cause lasting developmental problems.
Worry about the rapid spread of Zika has expanded across the nation, and the hemisphere beyond. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks.
Officials in El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil have suggested women stop getting pregnant until the crisis has passed.
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