This Zika Virus---

It appears as if there may well turn out to be millions of children born with microcephaly. Oh, those poor children---they are terrifically deformed.
What the hell kind of life will they ever have. And the parents--obligated to take care of them for---????
These diseases seem to be migrating north from tropical areas and it may get worse with the warming of the northern hemisphere, it seems to me.
Africa has some horrendous diseases and they may migrate north as time goes by.

 

possible tip of the near future ecopocalyptic ice berg?

i worry about that last line, as there are always those who look for a free pass by blaming their victims.

 

Well, not me. I'm blaming the primordial soup from which we all came, in creating the conditions for these maladies. I think most everyone knows that the higher the temperature,

the easier it is for ANY organism to thrive and multiply. Exceptions exist , but are few and far between.

 

that's right. and that's why i say ecopocalypse and pandemic and famine being the forms it will take that may actually do something about the out of proportion ness of the human species to everything else. more so then any of the things more easily dramatised to make movies that might get through to people about. i mean sea level rise and all that is real too, but mostly all that will do is drive population inland away from coastal cities, and that mostly no further then they have to, to where they'll still be next to what then becomes coastline. at any rate, that's where i believe the real impact of climate change that will affect everybody will come, diseases mutating faster then names can be invented for rapidly multiplying new forms of diseases.

of course you might not intuitively expect warming to have a negative effect of food production, after all it might grow more quickly and more crops per year, that is if you could get enough water to them, but mutating diseases won't just affect people directly, and increasing drought in places people have come to rely upon for food production. and then of course, malnourishment makes everything including humans more susceptable to disease. lowers imune resistence and all that.

 

This Zika virus has been dominating the news paper headlines all last week. Two confirmed cases in BC at least, maybe more.
My girlfriend, who is pregnant, is going to Jamaica for 10 days next month. Risky, if you ask me, even though she said Jamaica isn't on the list of places where she can't go.
If I were pregnant, I wouldn't be traveling anywhere. Not worth the risk, if you ask me.

 

If I was pregnant right now, I wouldn't be considering going any direction but north. Jamaica will still be there in a few months.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zika_virus
Nikos Vasilakis of the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases predicted that 10 to 12 years may be needed before an effective Zika virus vaccine is available for public use.

 

Thing is, some of the official statements have said that if non pregnant women gets bitten by the mosquito and gets the virus---she will have immunity for life. So, anyone that plans on getting pregnant and is IN the danger area and a woman tries to get it on purpose, that would make sense. IF I understood this correctly. The implication was that if a women
has had it before becoming pregnant, the baby would not be affected.

 

Scary shit, scarier than AIDS or ebola or anything that has come before it

And no one really saw it coming

Real Children of Men type shit

Some of these countries are already advising their woman not to get pregnant.

What will be the flow on effect in a decade or so

It was will spread, to any where there are the same mosquitos that carry dengue fever, which is a lot of places

Think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg so far

 

From Wikipedia;

1% is still enough to scare the crap out of everybody, 3500 cases in 4 months? Just in Brazil

Although it does appear the woman needs to be newly infected by Zika in the first trimester for it to cross the placenta and harm the fetus

The name Zika comes from a forest in Africa, Zika means "overgrown" in the local language

 

This could get interesting...

2016 Summer Olympics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Summer_Olympics

 

in 12 years, no way to catch up, when they start mutating expotentially.

its the little things; "real and present", as they say,
do for humanity yet, more then any war.

 

It's an even worse concern in countries like Brasil indeed. And of course especially if you live in the slums or jungle where there's lots of non flowing water and those particular musquitos....

It's already interesting as there are lots of people starting to experience the consequences now already. But yeah if this causes lots of people to stay at home instead of visiting the olympics (which is likely) it is getting even more sad for all those people.

 

In the long term, if this virus goes everywhere and a cure is never found, birth defects will drop to near zero because nearly all young girls will be bitten by infected mosquitoes before they reach puberty.

In the short term, we could be in for a rough transition period. We need a good screening test for pregnant women, and we need for social conservatives to STFU about all the resulting abortions.

In general, it's not a good year to get pregnant by choice, as we wait to see how all this is going to shake out. There's always next year, and the world doesn't have a dire population shortage that requires immediate action.

 

And a lot of the South American countries where this virus is so common also outlaw abortion. So no access to birth control, government advising people not to have children, rampant poverty, no education about sex, and abortion is illegal. Fuck.

 

Don't worry, I'm sure Monsanto is working really hard with no profit in mind to introduce a genetic mutation to ride us of mosquitoes.

 

A perfect storm for women, is it not?

 

Don't worry--the church will take care of them.

 

GM mosquitos have actually already been created and released in Florida, not sure if they've been released anywhere else. They've been modified to produce sterile offspring.

 

There's so many reasons to wage war on mosquitoes; malaria, West Nile virus, etc. They don't appear to serve any useful purpose in the food chain.