Health minister: Brazil is 'losing battle' against mosquito

RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazil's health minister says the country is sending some 220,000 troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading a virus suspected of causing birth defects - but he also says the war is already being lost.

Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil's armed forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country's Carnival celebrations.

Agency spokesman Nivaldo Coelho said Tuesday that details of the deployment are still being worked out.

Castro also said the government would distribute mosquito repellent to 400,000 pregnant women who receive cash-transfer benefits.

But the health minister also said the country has failed in efforts 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 ministers told reporters as a crisis group on Zika was meeting in the capital, Brasilia.

A massive eradication effort eliminated Aedes aegypti from Brazil during the 1950s, but the mosquito slowly returned over the following decades from neighboring nations, 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' 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.

The World Health Organization repeated Tuesday that the link remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.

But worry about the rapid spread of Zika has expanded across the nation, and the hemisphere beyond.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks.

One of them, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, reported 18 new confirmed cases of Zika on Tuesday, though none involve pregnant women. One case had been reported earlier.

Officials in El Salvador, Colombia, and Brazil have suggested that women stop getting pregnant until the crisis has passed.

Repellent has disappeared from many Brazilian pharmacies and prices for the product have tripled or even quadrupled where it's still available in recent weeks since the government announced a suspected link between Zika virus and microcephaly

Nearly 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly have been reported in Brazil since October, compared with fewer than 150 cases in the country in all of 2014.

Officials in another hard-hit South American country, Colombia, also ramped up efforts against Zika on Tuesday.