Zika: a case study in government ineptitude

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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The CDC has stated that infection with the Zika virus likely offers a person lifetime immunity against subsequent infection. With most viruses, this would be of little comfort, given the discomfort of most initial viral infections. But Zika is different: 4/5 people infected show no symptoms at all. Those who do report symptoms, describe them as mild, with no reported deaths attributed to the virus. The only real risk is to pregnant women.

A vaccine is likely many years away, but given the relatively mild symptoms associated with Zika, the best way to get an early vaccine is perhaps to go out and get yourself bitten by a Aedes mosquito. Perhaps you could even collect some of these mosquitoes, patent them, and offer them as a vaccine … charge people a $1000 a shot. Sounds crazy, but given the heartache associated with contracting the virus while pregnant, it’s definitely something to consider.

So what is the advice our government officials are giving their citizens? They’re encouraging people to try to avoid becoming infected. Brazil is engaging in the futile strategy of trying to eradicate the mosquito, which is a nice political gesture, given that they’ll soon be hosting the Olympics, but unlikely to stop the spread of the virus.

The only way to defeat Zika is to accept it as a new “fact of life”, and go out and get the vaccine, and become immune, before having sex.

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Rockefeller funded also.

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OK, forget trying to patent the Zika virus; you’re right, Rockefeller already owns the patent. But you can still go out and get a mosquito bite, without paying royalties to Rockefeller.

Anyways, all this lead me to an interesting article on genetically modified insects:

collective-evolution.com/201 … osquitoes/

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How long between a woman getting infected with the virus, and her ability to have a baby safely?

The Brazilian Army, not to mention the rest of the armies of the western hemisphere, can be put to work isolating puddles.

Each community, official or unofficial, should be assigned a home guard, who’s only responsibility is to identify stagnant water on a map (provided by the government).

Once a week, troops will show up, go to the locations, fill up water behind toppled trees or small ponds, larger bodies of water can be treated.

It will involve wheel barrels, shovels, sweat, and military cooks providing the guys out in the field with plenty of hydro and bag lunches.

If what your saying is true, I’m for people getting bitten, but I’m very worried about the risk of passing this on to women. I don’t understand the dynamics of it as a STD… how long it goes from infection to debilitating virus for offspring… does it ever really go away in these women?

Hence why Im nit rudhing oyt to catch the virus, it can cause issues for any children I may sire, or womsn I sleep with who might end up with someone else later on… seemingly getting it out of nowhere.

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My understanding is that the birth defects happen as a result of a woman becoming infected while pregnant. Hence, my argument that slowing down the spread of the virus only slows down people’s acquiring immunity to it. My plan would be to keep all pregnant women locked away in hermetically sealed buildings, for the duration of their pregnancies, or else fly them to northern Canada, or somewhere where the virus hasn’t yet spread.

But the possibility that once you are infected with the virus, it permanently ruins your ability to bear healthy children is something worth considering. I would say that this is very unlikely however, given that we have known about this virus since the 1940s. Right now, I would say that men should try to avoid catching the virus. The biggest threat for men is the possibility of their catching the virus, and simultaneously getting a woman pregnant and passing the virus on to the woman.

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Oh… that plan sucks.

The virus is spreading because mosquito species are spreading, and the virus has finally adapted to them. Its very hard for a disease to adapt to a mesquito’s physiology, most are digested in it’s stomach. Why AIDS doesn’t (apparently) doesn’t get spread like that.

What is the flying radius of mosquito species during their lifespan? Can cities or even provinces/states put up breeding barriers to mosquitos to keep them from advancing beyond a certain point? I doubt they fly hundreds of miles, they need stagnant water. Where can we plan barriers around cities and the countryside to stop this shit from advancing? We learned how to do this back during the days of building the Panama Canal, I see no reason why we gotta suddenly turn stupid and do nothing. The mosquitos can be combated on a strategic level, through scouting water sources, mapping, and planning swift responses to obstruct it’s breeding cycle.

Its now a STD as well. One we can stamp out supposedly well prior to women just entering into puberty prior to them hitting menopause. Latin America isn’t known for it’s sexual restraint, it’s rather backwards, but like with the Ebola outbreak in west Africa and their close contact funeral rites, the population will adapt. I just really wish there was a affordable test for this virus, so people know if they have it.

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There are different strategies for limiting the spread of mosquitoes; problem is, none of them is entirely effective. The sterilization preceding construction of the Panama Canal is an exemplary case using a combination of strategies on a large scale to a relatively small area. This involved draining of swampland, tons of pesticides, covering pools of water with oil, and door-to-door inspections. These strategies are much harder to replicate on a larger scale, such as that of ridding an entire nation of mosquitoes.

When the French tried to build the canal, they believed that bad air was the cause of malaria. Their solution to remedying this bad air was setting out pans of water, which became a breeding ground for the mosquitoes that spread malaria. This is the problem anytime humans try do something when they are not really sure what they are doing -they end up doing the exact opposite of what they ought to be doing. Even when they know what they ought to do, they end up fucking it half the time.

So a mosquito is about to bite you. If you are a young girl, not pregnant, and the mosquito carries the Zika virus, this mosquito bite potentially offers her a lifetime immunity against the virus, so that if she later becomes pregnant, she presumably would not have to worry about contracting the virus during her pregnancy. The problem is that this mosquito could potentially be carrying any one of a host of micro-organisms that are harmful to humans, including Malaria and Yellow Fever.

But given the number of diseases carried by mosquitoes, and the related health care costs and loss of productivity associated with this pest, it would make good sense to try to eradicate this species, if it were reasonably possible. The problem is that the most virulent species thrive in wet areas, where stagnant water is plentiful. Generally, it has been found to be more effective to try to prevent bites through the use of insecticide treated nets. The nets are quite effective at reducing bites, but in limited use in the poorest and most mosquito infested regions.

Many people, including myself, swear that tobacco smoke is an effective mosquito repellent. I don’t smoke, but I have tried tobacco; I avoid smoking for the simple reason that nicotine seems to do absolutely nothing for me. Nevertheless, I’ve found that a pack of smokes works better than any of the traditional repellents I’ve tried. You don’t even have to inhale; just puff on it enough to keep it burning. So one could take up smoking to avoid Zika; of course, smoking has its own negative effects on a fetus. But like I said, you don’t have to inhale, though I know most people would have more a problem with this than myself.

A promising new approach to curbing mosquito populations is these genetically modified mosquitoes (If you see some glow-in-the-dark larvae in a stagnant pool, know that you dealing with Franken-squitoes). In one test site, the number of cases of malaria was reduced from 133 to a single case, in one year.

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The tobacco smoke myth is a hold over from the plague days, it doesn’t do shit, I don’t smoke, rarely bitten… smokers in my old unit did get eaten up.

Its true, but I’m a philosopher who specializes in strategy and military organization, ancient and modern. Having a war college, and scholars and administrators, and a few philosophers like me really come in handy when the shit hits the fan in the beginning.

Cities are still structured on a Urban Core, Suburban, Rural layout. Urbanno city is exactly a circle, but they are roughly circular in terms of population density. 20th century automobile routes have grown the arteries out if large cities, creating satellite cities in a metropolitan area.

You move the Division level military headquarters (all but one state in the western hemisphere has a military, but still easy for them to follow suit with volunteers) into the largest city, with your generals. You send your infantry out, officers with maps, to each city. You scout out, ask around, where the water is. The larger pools should be mapped out already on maps, but just in case, everything is checked.

Everything is sectored out, be it grid or polar mapping, from these populated areas, and troops just bumble fuck in the woods, with a measuring stick. If the hole is deeper and longer, wider than the stick, you come back for it, marked on a map, like land mines are marked. If smaller, fill it on the spot. They got shovels, dig.

You keep doing it, till it’s filled. Get the locals in on the fun, free lemonade and patriotic speeches for all volunteers. Gave very open access to people reporting stagnant pools.

Once the immediate area is solved (and I know rainy season lasts a while in Brazil, so some places won’t ever end doing this), you can use the troops who knocked out their areas of operation to the front… your going to cut off paths for the mosquitoes to migrate easily. Your gonna cut off it’s territory into ever smaller areas. Corps of Engineers can drain swamps in me so America, or outside of farmlands, as a permanent divide between rural and jungle… scape the land over a few decades to keep disease from leaping over. We do massive public works on a similar scale in the US.

Its hard, but not that hard. If you got a war college, you got guts who can handle the complexity if this task. They can use varied tool, work between levels of government, volunteers, and coordinate internationally. Soldiering isn’t just about killing, there isn’t a soldier who wouldn’t prefer saving lives like this over killing. Western Hemisphere is largely at peace, it’s a good time to try this.

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El Salvadore has come up with a novel strategy for combating the mosquito: Residents are given a bucket or box and encouraged to keep it filled with water. A sambo fish is kept in the container, and mosquitoes lay their eggs in these water containers. When they hatch, the fish eat the larvae. It seems to work.

I am going to maintain that tobacco smoke is an effective repellent, out of my own experience (Of course, this could depend on the particular species of mosquito whose ground you’re stomping on), but I would agree that a smoker would be a prime target for any mosquitoes, once he puts his cigarette out. This goes to my theory that most of us have either a smoking gene or a drinking gene, and mosquitoes would prefer those with the smoking gene.

It’s kind of like what happens to rats when they are exposed to too much warfirin -they develop a resistance to it over successive generations. Humans have been smoking and drinking for centuries, and I’m guessing that this has had some impact on our physiology, depending on whether you come from a line of smokers, or a line of drinkers.

I come from a line of drinkers. Alcohol being a blood thinner, I reason that this is why my blood clots so quickly -its an adaptation to regular infusions of a blood thinning substance in my family tree. I start each day with a glass of wine. I’m not an alcoholic; I have no strong compulsion to do this. For me, its medicine, something my body naturally expects. I don’t touch the stuff after breakfast.

Now if you smoke, you’re increasing your risk of heart disease. I reason, therefore, that if you come from a line of smokers, your blood is going to be slow to clot, as a natural adaptation. Now we know one of the things that a mosquito injects into its victims before taking blood out is a blood thinner. So we know that having blood that doesn’t clot easily is going to make things easier for the mosquito. So I reason that if the mosquito is somehow able to detect these physiological differences, then the mosquito is going to prefer a person whose blood clots slowly -the smoker.

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In the era of centralized perception management where profitability is the highest value it is sometimes necessary to manufacture fear or engineer a crisis albeit even fake imaginary ones.

Being that civilization is ruled by fear this is very easy to do.

Increase the fear, increase the tightening reigns of control.

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I’ve always insisted that most of us will die from the stress of worrying about certain things long before they ever have a chance to do any harm. Do I need another gray hair from worrying about whether a mosquito will bite me? Whether a terrorist will attack the next building I enter? Whether the additives in my food will give me cancer?