Many
students will be returning this month from gap-years and time abroad, ahead of
starting, or returning to, university.
Meanwhile,
the Zika virus continues to spread quietly. Yet it only returned to our
newspaper pages this week when 156 cases were confirmed in the UK (amongst
travellers returning from Caribbean and South America).
One immunologist
was quoted in a London paper saying, “The mosquito that carries the virus is
not found in Britain, so the risk to the wider public is negligible.” This remark
seems to miss an important point. Just because an infectious disease does not
present a direct and immediate effect to one personally, it does not mean that
we should not be concerned with it – either medically or morally.
“Agape”
love calls for Christians to love and feel compassion for all people in all
places. Spiritually and morally, we should care as much about a woman or infant
in Brazil or Costa Rica as we do about ones in France, London, Oxford – even
about our friends and family.
As with
bird flu, swine flu and Ebola, many of us in the developed world seem less able
to focus on biological threats until they make their way “over here.” Those
epidemics showed us the folly, medically, of such thinking: the modern world is
a very interconnected place, and the space between “over there” and “over here”
is slim indeed.
The Revd Charlotte Bannister-Parker Associate Priest | 
