‘We are all at risk’: World leaders meet to discuss Zika outbreak
In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte is expected to meet his Brazilian counterpart Dilma Rousseff on Tuesday to discuss a possible joint declaration on the outbreak.
Brazil is home to about half of the 7,300 confirmed Zika infections in the country, which is a third of the country’s population of 1.2 billion people.
The declaration of a global emergency by Brazil and the US would help prevent the spread of the virus and also provide a blueprint for a new response, experts said.
“The declaration would enable the two countries to jointly take the necessary measures, which will reduce the number of new cases,” said Dr Raul Gomes, the head of the Centre for Tropical Health Research and Development (CTHRD).
“They can also put pressure on the countries with the highest number of infections to make a declaration that is very similar to the one put in place by the US.”
In the US, Trump announced that the country would declare a national emergency on Tuesday.
The president’s announcement came a day after a study showed that the number and severity of cases of the Zika virus is rising dramatically in the US.
More than 5,000 new Zika cases were reported in the first 24 hours of the new outbreak, the highest rate in the world, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The new cases are increasing across the US from Florida to California and the Pacific coast.
A state-by-state map released on Tuesday showed the state of Florida, which was declared a state of emergency on Wednesday, with the states of North Carolina and Texas also listed as having declared a statewide emergency.
The US states of Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana are also under the state’s declared emergency.
Florida was already one of the first states to declare a state-wide emergency after a mosquito-borne illness killed 17 people in Miami last month.
On Tuesday, Trump said he would travel to Florida to discuss the Zika crisis with governors there and also to visit Florida and Texas to discuss other infectious diseases.
The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, said in a statement on Wednesday that Trump would meet with Texas health officials on Monday.
Trump and Abbott have been locked in a dispute over Texas’ decision to deny the request from Texas to expand Medicaid coverage for the poor, who were already eligible for the state-based healthcare system.
Trump has also taken aim at Abbott, saying that he did not think that the governor of the Lone Star State was a conservative.
The two are expected to discuss “major health policy issues”, including the Zika outbreak and the implementation of the Trump administration’s plan to curb COVID-19 in Texas.
