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
 
 
 
 

Guess I'll be Googling "Zika" when I get home tonight... 

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.

Hmm. The ebola thing has all but disappeared from the news now, I thought that was going to wipe out the planet last year.

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

I saw what you did there. 

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. 
 
 
 
 

Supposedly,someone in Houston.Tx contracted this disease via sexual contact from an infected person
 
hmmmm
 
 

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.

I live on a Tropical Island / in a Mosquito region - we have always had Dengue and Chikungunya. I understood (but honestly am not that knowledgeable on this) that Zika is  related or similar to both these and of course is spread by the same Mosquito.
I also understood that the reason Zika was not so well known is that the normal symptoms (excluding the pregnancy issue) are extremely mild compared to both Dengue and Chikungunya - in fact many people do not even know they have had Zika, mistaking the symptoms for a mild flu type of illness.
 
This link to the birth defects is all pretty recent as far as I know. 
I have also heard people cast doubt on the link of Zika to birth defects, especially in Central America and South America - some people I know (albeit they are a little bit of the grassy knoll conspirator type!) say that the link to pesticides is far more relevant then the link to Zika.
I do not know what is true, but the pesticide theory has merit I think as Brazil in particular is now one of if not the Worlds largest user I believe of pesticides.
 
So Zika, very mild symptoms but now after being identified for years as presumably pretty benign, now presumed to be linked to horrendous birth defects; birth defects that look so extreme, they do remind me of things like the old Thalidomide scandal from many years back.
 
A number of years ago my other half managed to get both Dengue and Chikungunya within the space of a couple of years - they are both EXTREMELY painful and do have some lasting side effects - since then I have installed a a Mosquito killing system throughout the gardens of my House which has worked admirably.
 
I think my main issue with all of this is that in both regions I live in (Caribbean and Africa)   Mosquitos are the biggest cause of death and misery - FAR more than things like AIDS etc.
But what research goes into dealing with this - hardly any from what I can see.
So if Zika does take the fall for problems caused by pesticides (if the pesticide theory is correct of course) and some research is made into eradication of Mosquitos, well at least that would be a good thing I think!
Nigel