The World Health Organization declared an end to its global health emergency over the spread of the Zika virus Friday, prompting dismay from some public health experts confronting the epidemic.
An agency advisory committee said it ended the emergency — formally known as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern — because Zika is now shown to be a dangerous mosquito-borne disease, like malaria or yellow fever, and should be viewed, like them, as an ongoing threat met as other diseases are, sometimes with WHO help.
Committee members repeatedly emphasized that they did not consider the Zika crisis over.
“We are not downgrading the importance of Zika,” said Dr. Peter Salama, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program. “We are sending the message that Zika is here to stay and the WHO response is here to stay.”
Like all mosquito-borne diseases, Zika is seasonal and may repeatedly return to countries with the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry it, Salama added.
Individual countries facing serious new Zika outbreaks could still declare local emergencies, said Dr. David L. Heymann, chair of the advisory committee.
But other experts worried that the WHO’s declaration might slow the international response to an epidemic that is still spreading, and lull people at risk into thinking they were safe.
The WHO decision is “unwise,” said Dr. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.
Although the virus is not killing or deforming as many babies as originally expected, “the international response has been lethargic,” Gostin said.
“WHO’s action to call off the global emergency has provided reason for governments and donors to pull back even more,” he said.
Since the WHO first declared a state of emergency on Feb. 1, the Zika virus has spread to almost every country in the Western Hemisphere except Canada. Thousands of babies suffer deformities caused by the infection, and more are expected.
Dr. Albert I. Ko, a Yale epidemiologist, said he understood the WHO’s rationale but felt the agency acted too soon. The full extent of the damage in Latin America is unknown, he said, because many infected babies are yet to be born.