MHRA have offered to support WHO, as needed, in the evaluation of candidate Zika products. NIBSC responded immediately to the WHO request to develop and evaluate reference preparations for anti-Zika antibodies.

These reference preparations will provide researchers, product developers, and regulatory authorities with a single standard that can be used to benchmark the multiple diagnostic tests for Zika that are currently under development.

Better diagnostic tools are urgently and desperately needed. The current PCR test can detect the virus only during the brief window of viraemia. This weakness is further compounded by the fact that the illness is so mild. Many people infected with Zika will not be prompted to seek a test during this brief window of just a few days.

Moreover, the Zika virus frequently co-circulates with dengue and chikungunya viruses. These viruses cross-react in tests for IgM antibodies against Zika virus, making them imprecise.

Imagine the anguish of a pregnant woman living in or returning from an affected country, with no way of knowing whether she and her fetus have been affected. Ultrasound detection of microcephaly is possible only late in pregnancy.

As with Ebola, Zika has caught the medical and scientific communities largely empty-handed, with WHO left to promote mosquito control as the most immediate line of defence.

For both of these diseases, we are in the 21st century and yet cannot immediately tap the power of modern medical tools.

For Ebola, it was early detection, contact tracing, quarantine, and infection control. For Zika, right now, it is mosquito control at a time when more and more insecticides have been rendered ineffective by the development of resistance.

Zika is a tricky virus that continues to astonish scientists. Who could have imagined that a mosquito bite would be linked to severe birth defects and other serious neurological complications?

More than half of the world’s population lives in an area where Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are present. Who knows what the next nasty surprise will be?

We know there will be more nasty surprises, if not from the volatile microbial world, then from some of the other complex threats in this era of global perils.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The world has changed dramatically since the start of this century, when the Millennium Development Goals became the focus of international efforts to reduce human misery.

At that time, human misery was thought to have a discrete set of principal causes, like poverty, hunger, poor water and sanitation, several infectious diseases, and lack of essential care during pregnancy, childbirth, and childhood.

The results of that focus, and all the energy, resources, and innovations it unleashed, exceeded the wildest dreams of many. It demonstrated the power of solidarity and brought out the best in human nature.

Last year, the United Nations General Assembly finalized the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The factors that now govern the well-being of the human condition, and of the planet that sustains it, are no longer so discrete. The new agenda, with its 17 goals and 169 targets, will try to shape a very different world.

More and more we are seeing the worst in human nature: international terrorism, senseless mass shootings, bombings in markets and places of worship, ancient and priceless archaeological sites reduced to rubble, and seemingly endless armed conflicts that have contributed to the worst refugee crisis since the end of the second World War.

Our world is profoundly interconnected and this, too, has consequences. The refugee crisis in Europe shattered the notion that wars in faraway lands will stay remote.

The Ebola outbreak shattered the notion that a disease of small African nations will have no consequences elsewhere.

The explosive spread of Zika virus disease throughout Latin America and the Caribbean shattered the notion that a disease long considered a medical curiosity will stay that way.

And there are other perils. Inequalities, in income levels, opportunities, life expectancy, and access to health care have reached their highest levels seen in more than half a century. Some wealthy nations are losing their middle classes, the backbone of stability for democratic societies.

The climate is changing, with numerous consequences for health. These consequences are also profoundly unfair. The countries that contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions will be the hardest hit.

Chronic noncommunicable diseases have overtaken infectious diseases as the number one killers worldwide. Treatment for chronic conditions vastly increases the need for medical products and raises questions about their constantly rising prices.

With most newly approved cancer treatments costing more than $120,000 per patient per year, treatment is becoming unaffordable even for the wealthiest countries in the world. In some developing countries, the management of diabetes alone absorbs more than a third of the entire health budget.

We are losing our vital but fragile antimicrobials. The detection last year by Chinese scientists of a new resistance mechanism, the MCR-1 gene, sent shockwaves through the medical and scientific communities.

The gene is located on a mobile plasmid that transfers easily from one bacterial strain to others. This is a horizontal transfer of resistance, and it is frightening.

In the Chinese study, the MCR-1 gene conferred resistance to colistin, the last-resort antibiotic used to treat several life-threatening infections caused by Gram-negative bacteria.

Colistin is a 50-year-old antibiotic that was shelved in the 1970s because of its toxic effects on the kidneys. It was brought back into clinical use when all newer antibiotics began to fail.

As colistin had not been widely used, it was still effective. It was also cheap, which encouraged its massive use as a growth promoter in food production in several countries, including China.

The Chinese findings, which have been replicated in several other countries, solidify the links between the agricultural use of antibiotics, resistance in slaughtered animals, resistance in food, and resistance in humans. All of the dots are connected.

If we lose colistin, as several experts are predicting, we lose our last medicine for fighting a number of serious infections.

Last month, British treasury minister Lord Jim O’Neill, who heads the UK panel reviewing antimicrobial resistance, likened current trends to a “slow-motion car crash” and singled out vaccines as a crucial part of the solution.

As noted, widespread vaccination against bacterial infections would reduce the need for antibiotics, thus reducing a key driver of resistance at source.