Zika Virus Hysteria Got You Worked Up?
Relax. I do not buy for one moment that the Zika virus— which was been studied for 70 years and has never been linked to microcephaly– is causing babies in Brazil to be born with tiny heads.
Being the quack that I am, three questions first came to mind.
- What is the pesticide regulation situation in Brazil?
- Is there a Zika virus vaccine coming down the turnpike?
- Have prenatal vaccines been recently introduced to Brazilian women?
Let me start by saying that while some headlines are screaming that Brazil is “badly losing the battle” and the virus is “spreading explosively” across the country, the truth is that the criteria used to determine that 4,000 Brazilian babies had microcephaly is a head measurement of 33 centimeters or less. That would put 10% of American newborns into the microcephaly category. So either this is an epidemic of overly broad diagnostic criteria or we’ve got 400,000 cases of microcephaly in the US each year. (Spoiler: we actually have 25,000 cases in the US every year that you never hear about.)
Anyway. Eight months pre-Zika-hysteria Reuters ran this enlightening article entitled “Why Brazil has a big appetite for risky pesticides.” It turns out that Brazil has the dubious distinction of buying even more pesticides than the United States, which was previously the largest consumer of pesticides in the world…
Read more about the hysteria at the Levi Quackenboss website, where this article was originally published. Follow him at WeMe.
