Paradise crippled by rampant virus

The white sand beaches of Reunion, its turquoise seas and coconut palms beckon from the tourism sites on the internet, and prices for a four or five-star holiday on this Indian Ocean paradise have been slashed to silly levels, but there are few takers.

The culprit: Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, the vector for a painful viral disease that has ravaged the population of the French Overseas Department and dealt a body blow to tourism, the mainstay of its economy.

Out of a population of 777,000, 166,000 - more than one in five - have fallen sick with the disease over the past year and economic activity has been so devastated that the Government in Paris has approved €91 million ($163 million) in emergency help.

"No one could have predicted the extent of this health crisis. There has been no precedent for it in recent history," said Overseas Minister Francois Baroin on his return to Paris this week after a five-day visit to Reunion, flanked by Health Minister Xavier Bertrand and Tourism Minister Leon Bertrand.

The ailment is called chikungunya, a name that derives from the Swahili for "that which bends up."

The term is apt, because the virus causes arthritis-like swelling of the joints, causing the patient to be stooped over with pain.

The hospitals in St-Denis-la-Reunion, the main town, are overflowing with patients with chik. Exhausted doctors are treating sick people who are lined up in beds in corridors.

The streets, markets, hotels and beaches are eerily empty. Mosquito repellent is flying off the shelves, fetching prices as high as €9 a bottle.

Reunion's hit song of the moment, Ragga Chikungunya describes panic, mosquito spraying and insouciance in distant Paris.

Doctors are facing a steep learning curve about this obscure disease, which is believed to have originated in Africa.

When the epidemic erupted about a year ago, the text books were reassuring: chikungunya was a temporary disease, a kind of non-fatal flu that could not be caught twice because the body developed an immune response after the first infection.

But the picture now seems far more sombre than that.

Chikungunya has been directly blamed for the deaths of five people and cited as an indirect cause of the death of 72 others, mainly frail elderly people.

Added to that is evidence that the symptoms of the disease are getting worse among new cases, with extreme inflammation of the joints, infection of the liver and heart muscle, and that some people have succumbed to a second bout of the illness.

Still unclear is whether a pregnant mother can hand it on to her unborn foetus.

"We are facing a sickness for which we have too little information," admitted Health Minister Bertrand, announcing that €9 million out of the €91 million will be earmarked for basic research into the virus, the search for a vaccine and for a more effective treatment than mere painkillers.

€60 million will go to help small businesses, especially those in the tourism sector, and €22 million in medical and sanitary help.

The authorities have launched a campaign, backed by 500 troops flown in from France, to carry out anti-mosquito spraying and encourage the population to remove sources of water that help the insect to breed.

Cases of chikungunya have been recorded in the nearby French island of Mayotte, the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mauritius, as well as among a small number of people arriving in mainland France from Reunion.

The outbreak in Reunion has been blamed on last year's rainy season and a let-up in mosquito spraying that allowed the pests to proliferate.

But there is some concern that, helped by global warming, chikungunya and other diseases transmitted by this mosquito species, such as dengue fever and equine encephalitis, may eventually establish itself outside the tropics.

Helped by trade, the Asian tiger mosquito has spread rapidly from its Southeast Asian base.

It was first detected in the United States in 1985, and is now present in 26 US states. It was first spotted in Europe in the mid-1990s, apparently having been transported there in a container of tractor tyres shipped from America.

Eggs, live larvae, pupae and adults have been discovered in shipments into New Zealand from Japan, according to the specialist European publication Environmental Health Journal.