The Zika Virus

[luiz]

Google Scholar is definitely the place to look for scientific information about things like this. The three links you gave are an article by a chemical industry-funded think tank, a right-wing anti-environmentalist site, and a libertarian magazine. To be fair to Reason, Ronald Bailey is by far their most honest and thoughtful writer, but he's still going to be coming from an ideological position.

Here is a Google Scholar search, with the search terms 'effect of DDT on eggshells' and limited to studies that have come out since 2000, in case the early studies were flawed, as undoubtedly some were including the low-calcium one. But everything that pops up is consistent with there being a well-known, dose-dependent negative effect of DDT on eggshell thickness, with the exception of an article titled "DDT: A case study in scientific fraud" which was published in the journal of the right-wing think tank Association_of_American_Physicians_and_Surgeons. There was also an article supporting the continued use of DDT for malaria control (I agree) and a couple that noted low sensitivity for particular species of birds. It appears that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that it causes eggshell thinning, and all the contrary sources I have turned up have turned out to be generated by right-wing political organizations.

The evidence for human health impacts seems a bit more equivocal to me - it does appear to have a nonzero, but fairly low, level of chronic toxicity. It's definitely an endocrine disruptor, and it might be a carcinogen although the evidence for that isn't really strong enough to convince me. I think the cost-benefit analysis easily favors indoor use of DDT in malaria-affected areas, which is mostly what it is used for today. It has the nice property of being a mosquito repellant as well as an insecticide, so that even resistant strains are repelled from houses that have been sprayed with it.

But yeah, the environmental consequences are real. Definitely check Google Scholar whenever someone makes a scientific claim, especially if it's a politically charged issue. There are lots of disinformation mills out there, and they will often be the first hits on the regular Google.

Nevertheless, can we agree that banning DDT was based on faulty research and a "moral panic", which made things worse?

Anyway, Brazil is a prime example of a country with uber-conservative environmental legislation (not really followed in remote regions, but huge in urban areas), where even killing mosquitoes is difficult because pretty much everything is banned. So we have a dengue endemy, and now this zika epidemic, both largely self-inflicted IMO.

 

[Daw]

News say a tourist girl brought Zika to Russia from her vacation in Dominicana. Good news: mosquitoes are hard to find this time of the year here. And it will remain this way until late May the earliest.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

It is not a good evolutionary strategy for a virus to kill its hosts, at least not without first giving the victims long periods of time when they are contagious but seem healthy.

In countries with good infrastructure (including hospitals and effective quarantines, but mostly just decent plumbing for sanitary toilets and clean drinking water) and without traditions of touching dead bodies, really deadly diseases like Ebola don't spread very well.

 

[Bootstoots]

That's more a matter of strategy and trade-offs than anything else. Widespread agricultural use will cause a larger drop in mosquito populations in the short-term at the expense of more rapid and widespread acquisition of resistance. So lives might be saved in the short run, but there could still be a net loss in the long run. I'm not really familiar enough with the details of malaria control to know whether that strategy was the best one at the time or not.

Nevertheless, can we agree that banning DDT was based on faulty research and a "moral panic", which made things worse?

Anyway, Brazil is a prime example of a country with uber-conservative environmental legislation (not really followed in remote regions, but huge in urban areas), where even killing mosquitoes is difficult because pretty much everything is banned. So we have a dengue endemy, and now this zika epidemic, both largely self-inflicted IMO.

Yeah, it was definitely banned based on a moral panic. I suspect that reserving DDT for disease control is a good move - it seems to be especially effective relative to other pesticides, and this combined with its moderate environmental hazard makes me suspect that it is best used in a relatively targeted way. But the actual reasons for its agricultural use being banned had much more to do with the early environmental movement than with a concern for avoiding resistance.

 

[BirraImperial]

Meanwhile here in Costa Rica, the authorities have no evidence of the virus spreading here...There's been a few suspected cases, but they have turned out to be Dengue, which is spread by the same mosquito and it's under relative control in the country...So far I have found very little evidence supporting the claim that the Zika virus causes microcephaly on unborn children, so I think it's mostly over hyped by the press...From what I read, Zika actually seems to be more benign than Dengue and Chikungunya, so I wouldn't worry so much about it...

 

[civvver]

Well since my wife is pregnant this info has us really freaked out. The good news is we live in Michigan and there haven't been mosquitos here for at least four months, and I've also read the ranges of this particular mosquito are not this far north, at best it would probably halt around the gulf states or a little further north like maybe Tennessee. I guess the big question is can an infected person travel north and get bit by a different brand of mosquito and have that mosquito spread the virus? I don't know if that's been answered. But I do know we won't be going south for a long time, I wouldn't even go to Florida or South Carolina right now.

When the op said it's causing 1% of babies to have this condition I kinda thought well what's the big deal isn't that normal? But actually in the US only around 2-12 per 10,000 births have this condition. So yes that would be a gigantic increase.

But as others have said, I thought we were all going to die from Ebola a couple years ago, I never really bought into the swine flu and avian flu fears but Ebola did have me glad I wasn't traveling. However I think the reality is this too will blow over eventually, we'll probably get a vaccine soon. I mean just stuff like rotavirus, spread primarily by poor water supply I believe, and for which we actually have a vaccine, still kills like half a million babies in Africa every year cus they have poor sanitation and no money or not enough access to the vaccines. I don't want to be too cynical but developing nations have much bigger issues than Zika, I think this is just making major world news cus it's frightening to think that first world babies in Europe and North America could be at risk cus of some mosquitos flying north.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I guess the big question is can an infected person travel north and get bit by a different brand of mosquito and have that mosquito spread the virus?

This is pretty unlikely. If it were probable, it would happened already as there are lots of other types of mosquitoes in the regions where Zika is endemic so it would have most likely already made the jump if it could.

 

[Bootstoots]

This is pretty unlikely. If it were probable, it would happened already as there are lots of other types of mosquitoes in the regions where Zika is endemic so it would have most likely already made the jump if it could.

It's spread by Aedes aegypti, the same species that spreads dengue and yellow fever. They range up to the southeastern US, and then down through the lowland Americas (except deserts and highlands) to northern Argentina. Also all of South and Southeast Asia, and then down to northern Queensland. The overall distribution is shown by Wiki; I posted it below. Red is for places with epidemic dengue, blue for places that have A. aegypti but no dengue. It's from 2006 so they may have spread farther than this map would suggest.

It's also spread by Aedes albopictus. I believe this is somewhat less common than A. aegypti transmission, but A. albopictus has an introduced range as far north as Michigan and southern Connecticut, as well as southern Europe. For its map blue is native range and teal is introduced range.

Spoiler A. aegypti map :

Spoiler A. albopictus map :

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Yeah but my point is that there is what, now 2 species that can transmit it out of how many species of blood-sucking mosquitoes? Or take it a step further, out of how many blood-sucking parasites which could theoretically harbor it? I think that if it could use other vectors to infect people, that would be pretty bad. But it most likely would have already happened by now given how many species of these types of parasites there are in the regions where Zika is endemic. Thankfully, diseases have a hard time jumping from one afflicted species or vector species to another.

 

[civvver]

yeah but there's also weather in these cold places, I honestly don't remember the last time a mosquito even bit me, maybe last summer? Our mosquito season is only a couple months so even if the introduced ranged is here, unless you go into the woods in July it's unlikely to get you. We don't have a lot of standing water around, plus we all have air conditioning and keep our windows closed etc. You could probably just avoid camping and wooded parks, watery areas and be fine from all mosquito species up here. In flordia it's a lot harder.

 

[Silurian]

The standing water could be a bottle top.

What happens when you are walking to your car.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

yeah but there's also weather in these cold places, I honestly don't remember the last time a mosquito even bit me, maybe last summer? Our mosquito season is only a couple months so even if the introduced ranged is here, unless you go into the woods in July it's unlikely to get you. We don't have a lot of standing water around, plus we all have air conditioning and keep our windows closed etc. You could probably just avoid camping and wooded parks, watery areas and be fine from all mosquito species up here. In flordia it's a lot harder.

If you are referring to the maps bootsoots posted, I'm not sure what places you are talking about. Most of the ranges shown are in the tropics/subtropics.

And you are very fortunate indeed if you live in the US and don't have to worry about mosquito bites!

 

[Farm Boy]

I find this whole thing vaguely surreal. It's amazing how fast public sentiment turns to, "What poisons we got? DDT still works, right?" when I'm so used to hearing why we should never be using them. Though, the amount we already broadcast in suburbs for West Nile every year should have tipped me off.

 

[BirraImperial]

The standing water could be a bottle top.

What happens when you are walking to your car.

It takes a few days for standing water to become a problem...mostly water caught inside of a tire or a plastic container outside... Water has to be clean for the mosquitos to like it...mud puddles and such are no problem...


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[El_Machinae]

This is turning into a real thing.
When I truly became worried about Ebola, I started targeting MSF for my donations. They were the people running into the blaze, screaming for backup. So many other people went to their goto of 'close the borders! Screw you, got mine!' that I hate. But not the MSF. They run into problems, not away.

I'm realizing that we're woefully underfunding our vaccine infrastructure. We live in exponential times, and we're seeing what damage and suffering an unfortunate biological can do. Around the globe, women are patting their pregnant bellies and worrying about Zika and then there's the actual horror of birthing disadvantaged babies in the poorest regions.

We very well might live in a world where we worry we didn't ramp up vaccine infrastructure in time. It's like living in a world where you woefully regret not taking the time to wear a seatbelt. Small costs in the grand scheme. Huge consequences of failure.

 

[Kyriakos]

^The Ebola scare appeared to have been mostly hype, re how it supposedly was at the gates of Europe and about to cause large numbers of deaths in the continent.
Same with the 'bird flue virus'. And if you cry wolf so many times, it won't matter what you do if/when a real pandemic arrives. And some pharmaceutical companies really made huge new fortunes out of those scares.

 

[El_Machinae]

I feel a special horror that people believe Ebola was mostly hype. It takes a special viewpoint to think of ten thousand dead, patients lying to avoid horrific quarantine conditions, a wet dream for those types of terrorists willing to blow themselves up in crowds, and no vaccine as 'mostly hype'.

With any problem that has the potential to explode exponentially, all sufficient reactions will look like over-reactions in retrospect. But when you have armed guards forcing people to remain within contaminated zones, and when you have patients legitimately worried that going into quarantine is a death sentence ... yeah, 'hype'. If it weren't for the MSF being willing to take causalities, the world would be a very different place.

 

[jackelgull]

I feel a special horror that people believe Ebola was mostly hype. It takes a special viewpoint to think of ten thousand dead, patients lying to avoid horrific quarantine conditions, a wet dream for those types of terrorists willing to blow themselves up in crowds, and no vaccine as 'mostly hype'.

No, it just requires a centric viewpoint from someone who wasn't there. For the typical first worlder who heard so much about the disease for it to have so little effect on their lives, it must have seen blown out of proportion.

 

[El_Machinae]

I literally refrained from posting about suicide bombers during the pre-vaccine days for the worry that it might be one of the locations an idea germed. A timely plot of two bombings would have been a new level in the meaning of terrorism.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Nope. From the article: ""This is the strongest evidence to date that Zika is the cause of microcephaly,” CDC Director Tom Frieden told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He added that the findings did not prove that the virus causes the birth defect and that more tests are needed before the link can be proven definitively."

To this day, there is no prove that Zika causes microcephaly...

A month after this post, back in April, the CDC issued a stronger warning about the link between Zika and microcephaly.
http://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/ne...ephaly-brain-damage-confirmed/article/489894/

HealthDay News — Zika virus is a definite and direct cause of microcephaly and other brain-related birth defects, health officials from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday. The CDC made its announcement following an evidence review published online April 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"It is now clear," CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, MPH, said at the April 13 media briefing. "The CDC has concluded that Zika does cause microcephaly." Further, it appears that the mosquito-borne Zika virus causes a particularly severe form of microcephaly that does terrible damage to infants' brains, said Sonja Rasmussen, MD, director of the CDC's Division of Public Health Information and Dissemination.

The first Zika-caused microcephaly baby was born yesterday in the US sphere of influence in Puerto Rico.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireSt...s-1st-zika-related-microcephaly-case-39097629

Ana Rius, the island's health secretary, said a fetus turned over by an unidentified Puerto Rican woman to U.S. health officials had severe microcephaly and tested positive for Zika. Rius declined to say whether the woman had an abortion or miscarried, but said the microcephaly was diagnosed through a sonogram. She declined to provide other details.

"We were waiting for this news at some point," she said. "I want to urge any pregnant women with even the slightest concern of infection to go see a doctor."

Zika can cause severe birth defects, such as babies being born with abnormally small heads and brain damage. The World Health Organization declared Zika a global emergency in February, and the virus has spread quickly throughout the Americas.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it conducted the laboratory test that confirmed the microcephaly diagnosis.

"This case of Zika virus disease in a pregnancy saddens and concerns us as it highlights the potential for additional cases and associated adverse pregnancy outcomes," the agency said in a statement.

One guy thinks brain damaging viruses are what causes intelligent species not to die out from the universe, but go back to being dumb animals.
Brains and intelligence takes a lot of energy after all.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/is-zika-how-humanity-ends/

If pathogens arise that explicitly target brains it might not always be the case that they're fast acting or very obvious. One could imagine that by the time a species recognizes what's going on it's no longer smart enough (at least collectively) to solve the problem. Or (perhaps worse) a species fails to notice at all, and its civilization dims into the eternal night of neural simplicity, never quite understanding why.
So it's possible that here is another addition to the long list of reasons for the seeming absence of other civilizations in the universe: intelligence will always be beaten by pathogens capable of degrading minds.