Zika vs. Stupid

It seems as if the "virus du jour," is Zika. 
 
But I am more wary of stupid people than I am about Zika.
 
There is no repellent for what stupid people might do.
 
Jesse Q. Screed
 
 
 
 

Oh yeah... there's a bunch of conspiracy theories floating around on this one.
 
I find it interesting that it was practically unheard of just 6 weeks ago. Now, all of a sudden, it's all over the place and with the olympics coming up, and people flying in from practically every country in the world to Brazil and then returning home.... it's the perfect set up for a worldwide epidemic in record time especially if it's as contagious as they claim. 

We'll see.

I'm still afraid of women after that whole "bird flu" scare.

No real need to imagine a conspiracy, this is just a case of the limits of epidemiology in the third world. Zika has been identified in Africa for decades, and was thought to be a relatively benign infection causing minor or no symptoms. As such it did not leap into the public consciousness, and was probably present as a nondescript flu-like illness for some time before it was identified as a new epidemic spreading across the Pacific Islands to Central and South America. Africa is notoriously poor at public health surveillance, and the occasional child born with microcephaly there may well have simply been assumed to be a genetic accident. What did eventually become evident is that Brazil, which is much better at public health, was showing an astounding increase in the number of cases of a generally very rare birth anomaly over previous experience in 2015. One Brazilian state went from seeing 10 cases a year to 147 cases. That is like going from seeing one or two people splitting a lottery prize to seeing 15 to 30. 
 
That caught public health attention, and led to testing for Zika in affected infants and their mothers, where it was found in a concentration that suggested causality. The intense scrutiny, including suspecting more cases of "flu" might be Zika and specifically testing for it when it was suspected helped to give the impression that this is suddenly appearing at very high frequency. It also prompted testing contacts of known cases who had not traveled to epidemic areas or been exposed to the mosquito vectors, which has tended to confirm earlier sporadic case reports that indicated that the mosquito might not be the only mode of transmission. Sexual transmission is currently getting a lot of airplay, and blood transfusion has been suggested. These alternate routes would be hard to elucidate in an area where the mosquitoes and infected people are commonly found together, as less common routes would be masked by the more common.
 
It is still not entirely clear what the microcephaly risk of a Zika infection in a pregnant woman is, whether it differs if contracted at different stages in pregnancy or if there are particularly dangerous strains of the virus. But microcephaly is such a disastrous anomaly, that public health authorities have issued some pretty broad and, to some people scary, recommendations in an effort to contain and mitigate the risk. There is good reason to believe that mosquito control will be very effective in halting the spread in epidemic areas, although if other modes of transmission prove common, it may not eradicate it. The good news is that the virus is only transmitted human to human (most often via a mosquito vector) and, unlike West Nile virus, will not be distributed widely by birds or other animals. The bad news is that many infected humans will have little or no symptoms and will travel by air carrying the virus to new locations. The sort of good news for most of us in the northern hemisphere is that the Aedes mosquitoes do not like the cold. Although they are found in the southern United States, the natural tendency of people who can afford it to screen and air condition their environment reduces the chance of infection. 
 
 
 
 

Guitarhacker
Oh yeah... there's a bunch of conspiracy theories floating around on this one.
 
I find it interesting that it was practically unheard of just 6 weeks ago. Now, all of a sudden, it's all over the place and with the olympics coming up, and people flying in from practically every country in the world to Brazil and then returning home.... it's the perfect set up for a worldwide epidemic in record time especially if it's as contagious as they claim. 

We'll see.

Which "they"?

Zika seems to have been around a long time, first described in 1947 so discovery pre-dates ebola by 29 years, but had few reported/confirmed cases until the current outbreak in South America began. Possibly because the symptoms are apparently usually fairly mild, can look like quite a lot of other more common short-term viral infections and many, maybe most, people get no symptoms at all.

I'm told by She Sitting Opposite Who Knows About These Things that studying a virus "in the wild" is very difficult when either it doesn't turn up very often or no-one notices it much, so it's pretty normal for not much to be known until there's a major outbreak because until then there just isn't enough data available. This is a particular problem when the virus usually turns up in some parts of the developing or under-developed world because often the data isn't collected until there's a large enough outbreak to trigger a response.

It's not like Zika is something like Ebola in terms of lethality or obvious unmissable symptoms, and look how long it took to come up with even a possible vaccine for Ebola despite lots of international governments and private sector companies studying the virus for over 30 years.

The junior conspiracy theorists will fantasise away as they always do while the conspiracy-theorisers-in-chief who make a living out of spreading fear, misinformation, quarter-truths and outright lies giggle all the way to the bank.

Meanwhile, http://www.cdc.gov/zika/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zika_fever

A major outbreak of a virulent and nasty new strain of flu virus in Brazil (or anywhere else), now, that might be something to worry about.

What is there to wonder about? It's not a conspiracy either that most bacteria have developed immunity to most antibiotics. Viruses and bacteria will herit the world. They spread and adapt and use all the pigholes there are.
 
This zika/zica as a name is problematic in Finland because there already is the old pig flu, and pig in Finnish is sika.
You need to be careful with pronounciation. :o) 
 
As for comparing zica and stupidity...the problem is zica can be analysed and defined, stupidity has as many forms and definitions as there are people...And yes, stupidity does more harm.

The 'conspiracy' theory revolves around genetically modified mosquitoes (GMM). A GMM was created by a British company called Oxitec back in 2012 to help fight dengue fever. That GMM was released into Brazil where dengue fever rates was high. There was some question about whether enough testing had been done before releasing the GMMs into the wild. (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/15/gm-mosquitoes-dengue-fever-feature?cat=environment&type=article). Combine this with some Sci-Fi Jurassic Park and other dystopia shows and you have the start of the conspiracy (https://www.rt.com/news/330728-gmo-mosquitoes-zika-virus/).
 
The same company that developed the GMM for Zika has also indicated that the same GMM technique may be useful to help stop the threat of Zika. The idea is to decrease the population of mosquitoes through genetic modification that does not allow the males to breed (http://www.livescience.com/53577-genetically-modified-mosquitoes.html). Another article here at NPR (http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/01/26/464464459/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-join-the-fight-to-stop-zika-virus).
 
The problem is that while there have been an increase in the number of babies born with microcephaly since the start of the outbreak (>4000), there is no definitive link between the Zika virus and microcephaly. There are a number of other causes for the disease. As was noted earlier, Zika has been around for a long time. It is only recently that it has been associated with microcephaly. Either something has changed with the virus or there is another cause that has yet to be determined.
 
Hope that helps a bit

MandolinPicker
The 'conspiracy' theory revolves around genetically modified mosquitoes (GMM).

I doubt the exact contents of the mosquito in question's DNA has anything to do with it. All female mosquitos drink mammalian blood and there happens to be at least one genus that has a sucker capable of passing micro-organisms and, in the right conditions, those micro-organisms can survive inside the mosquito and get passed on to the mosquito's next meal. "Genetically modified" are words that get conspiracy theorists all steamed up, but most of them know so little about genetics that their opinion isn't worth much. And the ones who do understand genetics but spread misinformation anyway are a form of social parasite.

 

MandolinPicker
As was noted earlier, Zika has been around for a long time. It is only recently that it has been associated with microcephaly. Either something has changed with the virus or there is another cause that has yet to be determined.

Viruses do evolve of course, and sometimes very rapidly indeed. Another possibility is that the virus is as it has always been and it's taken an outbreak on this scale to statistically expose the connection. Or at least that there is an apparent correlation.

Or maybe until recently no-one was asking the mothers of babies with microcephaly the right questions to find out they'd had a Zika infection while pregnant or did the necessary antibody tests to locate the evidence of previous infection froma blood sample from the mother. And if only around 1 in 5 infections shows any symptoms at all then the majority of those women won't even know they've been infected in the first place.

Whatever, it'll be the scientists who find out, not Alex Jones.