The Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) has an­nounced that the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) has re­moved its Zi­ka virus coun­try clas­si­fi­ca­tion scheme, which cat­e­gorised most of the Caribbean ter­ri­to­ries as hav­ing ac­tive Zi­ka virus trans­mis­sion.

This re­moval by the WHO comes on the heels of da­ta re­leased by CARPHA, giv­ing ev­i­dence that the Zi­ka virus trans­mis­sion in the Caribbean had been in­ter­rupt­ed for over 12 months, or was at un­de­tectable lev­els, there­by pos­ing very lit­tle risk to res­i­dents and vis­i­tors to the re­gion.

This was matched by da­ta shared with CARPHA by Cana­da, the Unit­ed King­dom, Eu­rope and the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, which showed that no Zi­ka had been de­tect­ed for over 12 months in trav­el­ers re­turn­ing from the Caribbean to their coun­tries.

This ev­i­dence was used by Cari­com open a let­ter to the WHO Di­rec­tor-Gen­er­al call­ing for the im­me­di­ate re­clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Carpha Mem­ber States from Cat­e­go­ry 1 (hav­ing ac­tive Zi­ka trans­mis­sion) to Cat­e­go­ry 3 (hav­ing no Zi­ka trans­mis­sion), ar­gu­ing that the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem had out­lived its use­ful pur­pose.

Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor, CARPHA, Dr James Hospedales ex­plained that the Zi­ka clas­si­fi­ca­tion was not on­ly hav­ing an ad­verse im­pact on the Caribbean, but it was al­so against the tenets of the In­ter­na­tion­al Health Reg­u­la­tions (IHR).

This ad­verse im­pact was con­firmed by the Caribbean Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion (CHTA) and the Caribbean Tourism Or­gan­i­sa­tion (CTO), who made a for­mal re­quest to CARPHA for the Agency’s in­ter­ven­tion.

Hospedales stat­ed: “The Caribbean is the most tourism-de­pen­dent re­gion in the world. It is al­so one of the most pop­u­lar hon­ey­moon des­ti­na­tions world­wide and on­go­ing can­cel­la­tions due to the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of most Caribbean coun­tries as Cat­e­go­ry 1 is hurt­ing the in­dus­try un­nec­es­sar­i­ly. There­fore, CARPHA felt com­pelled to pro­vide the ev­i­dence and to ad­vo­cate for the re­moval of this WHO Zi­ka clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem.”

CARPHA is the sole re­gion­al pub­lic health agency and pledges to con­tin­ue to work with its mem­ber states to en­sure that the Caribbean is ca­pa­ble of pre­vent­ing, de­tect­ing and re­spond­ing to pub­lic health threats af­fect­ing the re­gion.