The risk of the Zika virus coming to Russia remains present, and preventive treatment of residents living along the Black Sea coast is being undertaken due to concerns over US experiments on insects in the region, head of Russia's national health and epidemic watchdog Rospotrebnadzor Anna Popova said on Tuesday.
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th December, 2018) The risk of the Zika virus coming to Russia remains present, and preventive treatment of residents living along the Black Sea coast is being undertaken due to concerns over US experiments on insects in the region, head of Russia's national health and epidemic watchdog Rospotrebnadzor Anna Popova said on Tuesday."The results of analyses of patents registered in the United States on means of delivering insects by drones, which are also in place at the Lugar center [in Georgia], has forced us to conduct treatments across large areas of the Black Sea coast ... the area of treatment amounts to no less than 2,000 hectares [nearly 5,000 acres] yearly. These are our preventive measures so that trouble does not come to our territory. But the risk of such an occurrence ... unfortunately, is always present," Popova said.
Popova added that US researchers' interest in the latest achievements of synthetic biology, in particular, with regard to experiments with insect vectors, also raises concerns.
In September, former Georgian Minister of State Security Igor Giorgadze said that lethal experiments on humans may have been conducted in Lugar laboratory in Georgia. In October, Maj. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the commander of the Russian Armed Forces' Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops, said that US scientists working in the Lugar center tested toxic substances on local residents.
The Zika virus, a mosquito-borne illness that originated in Brazil, is typically harmless, but babies born to women who contract the disease while pregnant often suffer from neurological defects. Its symptoms are similar to those registered in other viral infections and include skin rashes, fever, headache, muscle and joint pain.
The virus is currently being reported in 86 countries. Russia is not among them.
