Nature is scary.

[JowGaWolf]

I think he was jus joking.

Yep just joking and acknowledging the efficiency at which mosquitoes spread illnesses. (the screwed human part comment). I wasn't addressing Zika specifically.

 

[Tez3]

Nothing much to brag about I'm sure everyone here can do that with an olive tree.

Olive trees don't grow here, try one of our big oak trees instead.

 

[Flatfish]

Not really. The ZIka virus is more media frenzy than zombie apocalypse. For at least 80% of the infected population, the infection causes no symptoms at all. In most of the remaining 20%, the symptoms are, basically, mild flu. Headache. Body aches. Low grade fever. Generally feeling "blah."

It's really only an issue for one small segment of the population, and that is women who are in the early stages of pregnancy.

Now, for that relatively small segment of the population, it's a huge deal.

Do you spend a lot of time worrying about malaria? Dengue Fever? Yellow Fever? West Nile? Viral encephalitis?
Probably not. But they're far more common. And for the majority of the population, far more dangerous. But they're not "new", they're not "exciting" and they're not being pushed by the media as the next Black Plague.

There are anywhere between 50 and 100 million cases of dengue fever every year. And 300-400 thousand cases of hemorrhagic dengue. I've had that myself, and it's miserable.
But it didn't stop me from going back to the same island a few months after I got recovered.

Over a million people die from malaria every year. But they're mostly poor people in sub-Saharan Africa, not a relatively affluent country like Brazil. So nobody get's real worked up about it.

About 30,000 people die every year in the US from the flu. Not some exotic strain of the flu either. Plain old seasonal flu.

Does the Zika virus warrant concern, research and education? Absolutely. But as happens so often, the media is more interested in ratings than reality.

I mostly agree, but there is a lot of research done and money made available for dengue research and after decades, the first vaccine finally was approved in 7 countries. There are some peculiarities about dengue that made vaccine development so difficult.

The same is true for malaria, there is a lot of research being done on that as well but it has been around for a long time and so yes it's not as news worthy.

Science goes through fashion cycles like everything else. After West Nile hit the US a lot of funding was made available and it allowed me to start my science career, then after a few years, WNV funding dried up leaving a lot of virologists scratching theirs head what to do next, even though the virus is now endemic int he US.

Now Zika comes along. Media frenzy plays its part for sure but there are legitimate concerns (as you said). The 80% of people with no symptoms figure is actually true for pretty much all the viruses in that family, including WNV and dengue. For WNV about 20% develop fever and less than 1% have neurological complications. One difference though is how WNV is spread. Infected people are dead end hosts, that means they do not infect another mosquito and the transmission cycle ends there.

That is very different from dengue and Zika. The mosquito that transmits those loves to be around humans, loves to snack on multiple people and thus leads to rapid spread in an urban setting. Then there's the thing with sexual transmission, you can be asymptomatic and transmit to your spouse who may or may not be pregnant. And the birth defects are serious and that is what gets people riled up.

So I don't think it's all hype. I for myself will be trying to tap into some of the funds for Zika research and do my little part in hopefully figuring stuff about the virus that might be helpful in the long run.

To bring this all back to Martial arts: next time you see a mosquito, sidekick it right into the proboscis.....