WHO Zika Response Unit

This is very scary and another hit to the island.

To make matters worse, I just heard on Good Morning America that the Zika virus can also be transmitted sexually.  If the person who goes to one of these places where it is rampant and contracts it, they can in turn transmit it to their partner.

Hopefully they will come up with a vaccine or cure.

May take a while to get a vacine Tonie, there are also several versions of the virus and it would have to work for all of them.

Lucky that my wife and I do not have to worry about having kids.

There is a lot more Fuzz about Zika than for HIV and HIV is deadly and life wasting for those that contract it. I think it has to do with kids affected having to be helped by the state/country since they are basically born disable so the bill is a lot larger for the state/country. So it becomes an issue with economics not about feeling bad of what happened to them.

These mosquitos have been carrying yellow fever, dengue and chikungunya for a long time and I am not aware of any previous serious attempt at their complete eradication. I could be wrong, but I am not aware of any beneficial service of this specific type of mosquito. There are plenty other types of mosquitos that will happily feed birds, frogs and fish. Then again why let any blood sucker survive? The birds, frogs and fish have other sources of food.

Denge vaccine took 20 years to create and close to 2 billions. This company says typical is 10 years and that they can shave some years from that. So for a Zika vaccine we are talking possibly 5 to 8 more years?
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/03/news/co … ne-sanofi/

Other measures that use DNA modifications are dangerous, we could end up making a worse mosquito.

I remember having to use mosquito nets on the beds for most of my childhood, we may be back to that. They sneak into the house even with window and door screens.

Looks like the president is trying to get appropriation to fight Zika, potential of 250 million for prevention, fighting the virus and looking after those at the most risk.
Article here: http://cb.pr/obama-asking-congress-for- … mbat-zika/

Fresh crushed garlic chased with fresh grated ginger root made into tea with honey kills viruses in short order. Had a lady friend with the swine flu for a couple of weeks, next morning after the fresh crushed garlic and ginger root tea with honey she called to say she was fine. I had the swine flu for 2 hours and am now Malaria free. It works I have been helping people with this for years now. Also fresh lemon juice eliminates colds, and honey heals cuts and scrape faster and better than anything else.

Hi Anguilla, never been into Holistic's, but good advice.
I do prefer 1/2 bottle of rum, to kill the germs, and if not at least you don't feel them.

Seriously, Ginger and Garlic are good for your body and help build up the immune system.

I could never make it as a vampire, I like Garlic too much.
Feed the cold, starve the fever, never got that quite right or is it reverse? - Either way, I feed both.

The so-called "data" coming out of Brazil simply can't be trusted, there is NO SCIENCE behind any of it, and worse still the WHO (Same wacky organization that told us all we shouldn't eat bacon and processed meats because they're more dangerous than the atomic bomb) is blowing the whole issue out of proprortion. They've gone so hog wild over this issue as to stretch their credibility to the breaking point. And now the WHO is also telling us that sugar is the new public enemy #1 too. Looks like the inmates have taken over the insane asylum.

First of all Zika Virus is not a deadly disease, it causes flu--like symptoms that pass in a few weeks. The sloppy research here in Brazil can't even make any concrete connections between Zika and Microcephaly, but the mere thought of a disease that could "possibly" cause birth defects causes more panic than Dengue, which has resulted in thousands of deaths ever could.

It might be worth your while to read my posting on the Brazil Forum, especially reply #5, #14, and #15.

https://www.expat.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=560370

Dengue has been rampant in Brazil since long before I arrived in Brazil 14 years ago. At that time spraying was commonplace. Trucks circulated in every city and for a while it looked like they were even getting close to a final solution to the Aedes aegypti mosquito problem. Then suddenly, and with no explanation, the government simply abandoned all efforts. Had they not done so none of these diseases would even be a problem now.

In the USA, a country with superb healthcare there are 12 cases of microcephaly for every 10,000 births. There are approx. 1.4 million births a year in the USA. Using that figure one can predict approx. 1,600 cases of microcephaly would then occur naturally in a country that until now didn't have Zika Virus.

In Brazil there were 1,046,135 births last year, so using the same figure there should be expected to naturally occur at least 1255 cases of microcephaly even if there was no Zika Virus. Brazilian authorities can't even come up with a reliable figure for the number of cases, let alone confirm if they are even microcephaly or not.

There is a political agenda hidden behind all of this. An agenda that is sinister and just can't be trusted. I don't know whether it is intended simply to take the Brazilian population's minds off the numerous political corruption scandals, or if it is to start building a tailor made excuse for a failure of the 2016 Olympic Games because of incompleted infrastructure projects and Guanabara Bay which is so polluted as to be toxic. Maybe it is a combination of both that this government has an eye on. Who knows?

If there is any scientific or medical evidence that Zika is even remotely related to microcephaly, it certainly isn't coming from Brazil. Our researchers are incompetent and cannot be trusted. There is also no scientific or medical proof that Zika is transmitted sexually, while it may well be, the research is simply not there and there aren't even sufficient suspected cases to even determine whether or not it is.

Cheers,
James
https://www.expat.com Experts Team

I have a concern that all that spraying if carried out in PR could potentially affect the coqui population which already seems to be in decline. "As Puerto Rican as the Coqui" may no longer apply if the decline continues. I have no scientific data, but every time I visit the island, I hear less and less of them at night.