Brazil Cautions Women To Avoid Pregnancy Over Zika Virus Outbreak (discovermagazine.com) 102
iONiUM writes: According to an article at Discover, "Authorities in Brazil have recently issued an unusual and unprecedented announcement to women: don't get pregnant, at least not just yet. Amidst an intractable outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, public health authorities in Brazil are highly suspicious of an unusual surge of cases of microcephaly among newborn children." There were over 3,000 cases in 2015.
It's believed this virus is linked to shrinking newborns brain, and it is spreading. "Zika virus is transmitted by mosquitoes, and it was first detected in Uganda in the 1940s. After spreading through Africa and parts of Asia, it has made its way to Latin America. There is no known vaccine to prevent or medicine to treat the disease caused by the virus. Since May 2015, the Brazilian government estimates that some 1.5 million people have been infected with the virus." The CDC has published an article about it, and travel warnings are now being issued for pregnant women.
It's believed this virus is linked to shrinking newborns brain, and it is spreading. "Zika virus is transmitted by mosquitoes, and it was first detected in Uganda in the 1940s. After spreading through Africa and parts of Asia, it has made its way to Latin America. There is no known vaccine to prevent or medicine to treat the disease caused by the virus. Since May 2015, the Brazilian government estimates that some 1.5 million people have been infected with the virus." The CDC has published an article about it, and travel warnings are now being issued for pregnant women.
And the zombie apocalypse begins! (Score:1)
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I'm guessing most guys for most of their lives have been also recommending this to their women...hehehe
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Amidst an intractable outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, public health authorities in Brazil are highly suspicious of an unusual surge of cases of microcephaly among newborn children
I've always suspected stupidity was a communicable disease. As a precaution, I recommend that all politicians be tested for Zika virus (if they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear).
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He's been depressed since the SpaceX first stage soft landing.
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Really? You can infer mood and state of mind from:
Moooooooooooooooo! You are all [insert word that appears in summary or is tenuously related] cows! Moooooooooooooooooooooo!
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You forgot the "X is for Cows" part
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Why do you think there's only one person posting the flavor of the month trolls?
Someone writes up a troll and spams it on a few "articles". Other people see it and, if they like it, do the same.
Someone's trying to make the "all women are wookies" one the next thing, but it's not gonna catch on. (Especially since he misspelled wookiees.)
The cow troll is great, but people got bored of it and don't post it anymore. I posted it (and variations of it) myself because I enjoyed it, but I never posted it as AC.
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Hmm, I'd date a wookiee...
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>"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind, and won't change the subject." -- Winston Churchill
Some would say that a definition which does not cover "A person who happily starved over a million children" isn't a very good definition. But Churchill wouldn't agree as that would mean he would have to include himself.
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Perhaps he's just moo-ved on?
Brazil has aggressive Mosquito control (Score:4, Informative)
That they rolled out to combat Dengue Fever. http://www.iflscience.com/heal... [iflscience.com]
Wonder if that has just been ineffective against illnesses with a Mosquito vector or just not this particular virus.
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You should maybe ask the Texans and Floridians. They may have a different point of view. Southern Brazil is cooler than those said US states.
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You should maybe ask the Texans and Floridians. They may have a different point of view. Southern Brazil is cooler than those said US states.
Southern Brazil (like Rio Grande do Sul) actually gets snow in July! Even parts of Sao Paulo state get down to the 30s and 20s.
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Someone needs to use CRISPR to genetically-engineer a female mosquito that does not drink blood
Plant nectar does not provide as much protein for egg laying. If there was no evolutionary advantage to blood sucking, it would not have evolved. So a no-blood-sucking gene would likely be out-competed in the wild.
A more fruitful approach may be to use CRISPR (or some other technique) to create Aedes mosquitoes that do not host the zika virus. The virus provides no known benefit to the mosquito, and other types of mosquitoes do not transmit the virus. So that should not be too difficult, and the modifie
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You're right about competition, but in combination with aggressive attacks on blood suckers, you could aid the non-bloodsuckers in filling in the niche. Much the same way that they try and kill bad gut flora and replace it with good (or harmless) gut flora to fill the niche where the bad gut flora would otherwise crowd out the good flora due to being established.
You don't want to end mosquitoes or something like them, because they're a big prey species up the food chain, but their particular blood sucking
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I see two problems:
1) How do you selectively target only blood-sucking mosquitos?
2) How likely is it that you could realistically introduce a serious competitor that doesn't unleash potentially horrible unintended ecological consequences? After all mosquitos are hardly the only nectar-feeders around.
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The virus takes up space in the digestive system of the affected mosquito and as it does not aid the mosquito, it must logically hamper the mosquito, an identical mosquito that resist the infection will have a minor advantage. Also the genome resistance should also be dominant, so it a pairing between a resistant and non resistanct variant the resistance would be passed on.
Also in a plus for conspiracy theorists the development of the spread of the infection and it's sporadic localised spread. It would b
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We don't even know that it is causing microcephaly now. There is absolutely no causal evidence linking the condition to the virus. What we have is a virus outbreak and a sudden, surprisingly high, incidence of a rare condition. That's correlation, not causation.
Now since we have no actual explanation for the high incidence, the Brazilian government felt it best to advise people to avoid getting pregnant until after mosquito season but that's a purely speculative preventative measure - they were very honest
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Actually I'd think you'd want such a gene to be recessive, so that only "pureblood" resistant mosquitos would have the advantage and would eventually outcompete the others. Otherwise the population would end up being mostly halfbreeds who are themselves resistant, but about 25% of their offspring be carriers (assuming simple two-gene inheretence). If one in four mosquitos is still a vector then you haven't really solved the problem.
Of course eiter way, that depends on resistance offering enough of an adva
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Simply not fast enough, you need an accelerated process otherwise you are claiming, meh so what if million brain damaged children occur in the interim. So the faster the better and you need to do many things at once. Population control around high human populations with concentrated releases just outside that zone. Searching for a cure. Evaluating methods of mitigating symptoms. So you do everything you can at the same time because the risks are so high. You simply can not wait for a few hundred thousands
Re: Brazil has aggressive Mosquito control (Score:4, Informative)
I'm from Brazil. The same mosquito (Aedis Aegypti) is responsible for three diseases. Originally it was just Dengue Fever that was the problem, but recently there's been an outbreak of Chikungunya and Zika as well. These diseases have similar symptoms, but the latest one, Zika, is being deemed responsible for a huge increase of Microcephaly in newborns lately that is all over the news. There is indeed an aggressive mosquito control front and Government initiatives to inform the population, but keep in mind that it's Summer here in the Southern Hemisphere, and the higher temperatures are causing these mosquitoes to reproduce like a plague, making it much harder to solve the problem.
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Thanks for the response Volanin!
How does your country feel about DDT? I have mixed feelings on using it. I understand it's been instrumental in curbing malaria in many parts of the world, but there are environmental consequences to using it.
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Unfortunately, in many parts of the world mosquitoes have adapted to be relatively immune to DDT. I don't know that this is true of Brazil, but I wouldn't be surprised. (Of course, often the adaptation is to smell the stuff and find it so distasteful they go somewhere else, but that's been a fairly effective strategy.)
IIUC, the only way of using DDT that's still really effective (outside of bed nets) is to spread it over stagnant pools of water. But if you have lots of slowly flowing streams that doesn't
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Vegetable oil works very well for small to medium bodies of water it only takes a little bit. It's what we use in Canada for mosquito control along with Bti(Bacillus thuringiensis israeliensis) and Methoprene, we also use pesticide foggers for adulticide when the weather is very humid in the summer. Most of Canada has large flowing bodies of water as well, so usually before any program comes into use there's 3-8 years of ecological impact studies to determine what other problems may crop up because of it.
It's just nature's way... (Score:1)
After all, having fucked up the world quite a lot with our vaunted "intelligence", it's no wonder nature wants to find a way to stop it. I figure microcephaly is a pretty good way of shrinking intelligence.
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Nature doesn't have feelings. Doesn't care about you, me, or anything. Doesn't care if the planet is destroyed or we are. Nature doesn't have any thoughts on any subject at all. No more than mathematics or physics or chemistry has thoughts, feelings, motivations, or desires.
Please stop anthropomorphizing.
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Please stop anthropomorphizing.
They hate it when you do that.
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Seems to me you're making a pretty big assumption yourself. Consider: from a sufficiently "zoomed in" perspective your brain is nothing more than a large clonal colony of specialized single-cell organisms supported by an even larger and more varied colony in symbiosis with far, far more non-related microbes, with no evidence to be seen of this "mind" thing you claim exists.
Similarly, simply because we see no direct evidence of a mind in the ecological superorganism does not mean it doesn't exist, it may si
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Seems to me you're making a pretty big assumption yourself. Consider: from a sufficiently "zoomed in" perspective your brain is nothing more than a large clonal colony of specialized single-cell organisms supported by an even larger and more varied colony in symbiosis with far, far more non-related microbes, with no evidence to be seen of this "mind" thing you claim exists.
Similarly, simply because we see no direct evidence of a mind in the ecological superorganism does not mean it doesn't exist, it may simply operate from a reference point that we cannot relate to.
Gaia's getting pissed off with AGW and has decided to post on slashdot.
We can't, the Pope won't let us use birth control! (Score:2)
The populace responded.
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Fertlity rates [1,9] are bellow the US's [2,1]. That make us look more like a 1st world country. We NEED people.
Yeah, Brazilian here.
Isn't that a Catholic country? (Score:2)
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The Roman Catholic church is pretty clear on the topic. The Vatican's policy impacts societies in South America, Africa, North America, and Western Europe.
Latin America is deeply committed to Catholicism, where North America (Anglo America?) has more protestants and a greater variety of Christian denominations and a long history of excluding Catholics from politics in regions (yeah, that's not so great, but I'd argue that it's reality).
This is going to come down to Pope Francis either taking a public positi
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1) not shrinking among elected officials in Brazil. (based on age demographic, which is not totally accurate, but that data does seem to fit complains from the younger generation)
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Catholicism is shrinking very fast. I'd say about half Brazilians are Catholic by now. The other half is evangelical
That is not an improvement.
Catholicism has its obvious blind spots concerning women's reproductive rights, but at least they otherwise believe in science and reason. Evangelical Christians are not much better than Scientologists.
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Most of SA is indeed catholic, but that's changing fast [citation needed] and birth control methods such as condoms and pills are distributed for free by the Ministry of Health
Tax payer funds for birth control? OMG, wait till the Republicans hear about this. They are gonna freak out. What? oh? They already know? All that noise they make is just for entertainment? OK, that figures. Does their base know?
It's actually a national, male conspiracy. (Score:1)
Even if it only results in a 4% increase in blowjobs, it will have been worth it.
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You cracked the code. microencephaly ==> "give me a little head"
Diversity Is Our Greatest Strength! (Score:2)
Diversity Über Alles!
(an unreleased Dead Kennedy's single)
Not just Brazil (Score:5, Informative)
Now in Venezuela as well. We had chikunguya last year and now Zika as well. The aedes family of mosquitoes are extremely dangerous, now causing 4 common diseases (dengue and yellow fever as well)
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Brazil is already sub replacement rate. It's population will dwindle. I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Life is unfair. You can basically say most of what you were trolling about about most places in the world. You can do pretty much two things: give up and nobody have kids, or you can try to be a part of the solution. Evidently your reaction to most problems would be "just give up"
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Evidently your reaction to most problems would be "just give up"
Suicide rates are up all over the planet. Maybe we're actually past that "carrying capacity" thing we always talk about. When you overpopulate any kind of animal, they start to go wrong. The only country with unpopulated hospitable land is the USA; a small percentage of the land now controlled by the BLM is pretty nice. But it's not like they're going to start handing it out. This is not about to turn into a defense of some dipshits currently starving themselves in a federal building or anything, but the BL
Re:Why are these Brazilians even having children?! (Score:5, Informative)
Dear ignorant Coward.
Brazil is also known [by whom looks at it closely] for its beautiful mid-sized cities [where favelas are virtually unknown], where you live better than in US. Its wonderful beaches, and its growing middle class, that makes up more than 50% of the population. It is also known as middle income country that's getting rid of poverty faster than any other nation. Also, we are the ones researching the cure for the exact same diseases TFA mentions. We will win in the end, and if you think this is China's century, you'd better think again.
Now you can get you desperately ignorant words written down to a piece of paper and shove it up your ass.
Yeah, Brazilian here.
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Yeah, Brazilian here.
HUE HUE HUE HUE
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You can also shove your shitty Ph.D up your lower middle class anus. Because I have one too, and I don't give a fuck about it. And I'm really rich [and arguably smarter than you, since I don't go around bragging about my fucking USP Ph.D], traitor asshole.
Pretty good going for a thirteen year old.
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Yeah, Brazilian here.
Good to know there's no bias in your post then.
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Plus the women are smoking hot, so I can see how it is hard to say no to them when they throw themselves at you.
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Plus the women are smoking hot, so I can see how it is hard to say no to them when they throw themselves at you.
You're just being cruel now.
I have a vision of a thousand nerds rushing to buy plane tickets to Rio de Janeiro.
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That is quite the image...thank you.
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My first wife was Brazilian so I got to spend a lot of time in the country and can attest that this is just as accurate a description he left out (especially the midsize-cities, I spent a lot of time in Suzano and Fortaleza). It's a fantastic country by every measure. And I would add to what you said:
1) FAR Better healthcare than the US (I speak as somebody who has gotten ill on occasion in both countries) - nowhere else I've been in the world did a doctor tried a common flue with such care. Instead of the
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Now you can get you(sic) desperately ignorant words written down to a piece of paper and shove it up your ass.
Yeah, Brazilian here.
I am not who you are replying to but perhaps you should address this issue and the wording in the article if you wish to change people's perception of Brazil.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga... [bbc.co.uk]
Kind regards,
Dave