Christmas, Good News and Chikungunya

For those of us who are not EU citizens, and who have travelled through Europe in the past, the recent extension of the Schengen agreement is a god-send.

From Friday 21st of December 2007 the EU's Schengen agreement allowing passport-free travel for non-EU citizens has been expanded to include nine more countries.

Twenty-four of the EU's 27 member states are now participants in the agreement after the new entrants, mainly Baltic and eastern European countries, lifted travel restrictions.

After sawing through a barrier on Slovakia's border with Austria, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico said: "From midnight tonight you can travel 4,000km from Tallinn in Estonia to Lisbon in Portugal without any border controls."

No more need to worry about applications to a consulate or an embassy for a visa MONTHS before leaving home, no more customs and passport controls at each border, no more queues when crossing borders by car or camper van and no more interruptions to one's sleep when travelling by train as customs and passport control officers wake you and demand that you show them your visa, your passport and of course if required open your bags.

Of course for every good thing there is a down side and I am afraid that it has been left to Elisabeth Rosenthal of The New York Times to write a story that is less than "Good News" especially on Christmas eve:

Castiglione di Cervia, Italy - Panic was spreading this August through this tidy village of 2,000 as one person after another fell ill with weeks of high fever, exhaustion and excruciating bone pain, just as most of Italy was enjoying Ferragosto, its most important summer holiday.

Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics.

The epidemic proved that tropical viruses are now able to spread in new areas, far north of their previous range. The tiger mosquito, which first arrived in Ravenna three years ago, is thriving across southern Europe and even in France and Switzerland.

Now it is winter in Castiglione di Cervia, near freezing as the sun went down on a recent evening and Christmas lights glowed across the piazza.

There are no mosquitoes now. But dozens of residents still suffer from arthritis, a known complication of chikungunya.

But the biggest mystery is whether chikungunya will emerge here next summer. In the tropics, it is a year-round disease, since the mosquitoes breed continually.

But the virus can winter over in mosquito eggs, too, and no one knows if there are reservoirs of sleeping eggs in some pool of water in Italy.

With climate change at hand, Dr. Bertollini said, chikungunya will surely be back somewhere in Europe again."

Never one to consider national borders, bacteria and insects have always been the bane of of those people whose responsibility it is to control the spread of disease.

Quarantine and health authorities are likely to have their jobs made even more difficult by the decision to remove all travel restrictions among EU member countries by non Eu citizens.

Recently in Australia there was an outbreak of Equine Influenza which devastated many of the industries that depend on horses. Millions of dollars were lost and lives ruined.

What has been happening in Italy is, I sadly predict, just a foretaste of things to come.

Does this mean that we should be concerned and take out 'insurance' in the form of immunization where possible? Absolutely unless the risks from the immunization outweigh the risk of catching a deadly disease.

Does it mean we should not travel?

Hardly, - what it does mean is that we should now start to think about taking the precautions in Europe that we would previously have reserved for more tropical climates. Above all to ensure that we take with us copious quantities of insect repellent that is guaranteed to be effective in tropical climates.

Europe simply is not what it used to be!