Zika Virus: News, microcephaly and conspiracy theories

[deirdre]

I'm starting this thread for general news, updates and discussion regarding Zika Virus.

Conspiracy theories and specific claims of evidence contrary to health official reports should be presented in new threads. As such threads are created i will update this post with links to them.


Individual claim threads:

• https://www.metabunk.org/gmo-mosquitoes-spreading-zika-virus.t7251/

(gmo mosquitos)

• https://www.metabunk.org/claim-zika-virus-horrific-coverup-caused-by-governments-mandating-vaccines%E2%80%99.t7286/

(Tdap)

• https://www.metabunk.org/zika-virus...-causing-brazils-microcephaly-outbreak.t7305/

(pyriproxyfen, pesticide, monsanto)

 

[MikeG]

I had a related question.

How many total Zika cases are we talking about? I found a Reuters report that said 1.5 million people in Brazil are infected.

http://www.reuters.com/article/health-zika-brazil-exclusive-idUSKCN0VA33F

There is an al-Jazeera story that places the number in Colombia at 20,000.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/20000-infected-zika-virus-colombia-160130165855047.html

Does anybody have official sources?

 

[Mick West]

There's a graphical representation of those same numbers here:
https://nerik.cartodb.com/viz/b623aa76-c8dc-11e5-8752-0ecfd53eb7d3/public_map

Database:
https://nerik.cartodb.com/tables/zika_cases_country/public

However, it does not say where the numbers came from (the cited reference is for the orange circles, prevalence of a type of mosquito)

 

[deirdre]

I had a related question.

How many total Zika cases are we talking about? I found a Reuters report that said 1.5 million people in Brazil are infected.

http://www.reuters.com/article/health-zika-brazil-exclusive-idUSKCN0VA33F

There is an al-Jazeera story that places the number in Colombia at 20,000.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/20000-infected-zika-virus-colombia-160130165855047.html

Does anybody have official sources?

havent found any official sources with estimate numbers yet, but saw this..explains a bit more about estimates

The figures were based on models of how dengue spreads and the number of cases seen in Brazil last year, which public officials have pegged between 500,000 and 1.5 million, Dr. Sylvain Aldighieri, an official with the WHO’s Pan American Health Organization, told reporters. But much of the data in Brazil has not been verified, Aldighieri said.

“We have big gaps in terms of confirmation of the real situation,” Aldighieri said. “These are estimates.” http://www.statnews.com/2016/01/29/zika-case-estimate-4-million/

Content from external source

 

[MikeG]

There's a graphical representation of those same numbers here:
https://nerik.cartodb.com/viz/b623aa76-c8dc-11e5-8752-0ecfd53eb7d3/public_map

Database:
https://nerik.cartodb.com/tables/zika_cases_country/public

However, it does not say where the numbers came from (the cited reference is for the orange circles, prevalence of a type of mosquito)

Thanks Mick. I see what look like citation numbers with the information (circled), but I can't find the actual references.

 

[qed]

Alert! There's a dangerous new viral outbreak: Zika conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories are not unlike viruses. Mostly they circulate harmlessly on the fringes of society, but every now and then a mutation for increased transmissibility can lead to a mainstream outbreak with seriously damaging consequences in the real world.

Content from external source

the guardian

 

[MikeG]

I found an interesting article on ScienceBlogs.


Zika virus and microcephaly: The conspiracy theories flow fast and furious

Thus it’s not surprising that it’s unclear as of yet whether there is a true correlation between the Zika virus or even whether there is a true surge in cases of microcephaly, as this recent Nature article discusses:

This ‘awareness’ effect is well known and inevitable, they say, and must be revealing cases that would have gone unnoticed under normal circumstances. They also say that a high rate of misdiagnoses among reported cases is likely because the diagnostic criteria being used for microcephaly are broad.

Lopez-Camelo and Orioli presented their analysis in Portuguese-language reports, and, after Nature’s enquiries, provided an English version of the summary (ECLAMC Report).

They say that from the epidemiological data available, it is impossible to establish the true size of the surge in microcephaly, and whether there is any link with the Zika virus. In particular, large ‘prospective’ studies, in which pregnant women in areas of Brazil experiencing Zika outbreaks are monitored to see how many of their children develop microcephaly are needed, they say. Several research groups in and outside Brazil are already planning such studies, and some have begun.

In particular, the investigators, Jorge Lopez-Camelo and Ieda Maria Orioli, from the Latin American Collaborative Study of Congenital Malformations (ECLAMC), point out that the criteria for diagnosing microcephaly are not clear and it is not a trivial problem to estimate the expected number of cases of microcephaly in a population. They note that the Live Birth Information System (SINASC) database records about 1% of birth defects in live births for an expected rate of 3%, which means that an active search for a specific defect could result in an increase of as much as 2/3 in the number of cases usually recorded, even in the absence of an increase in incidence of that particular birth defect. Also, right now Brazilian health authorities are treating all fetuses with head circumferences more than two standard deviations below the mean and newborns with a head circumference of less than 32 cm as suspected cases. These are broad criteria that will inevitably diagnose many children within the normal growth range who don’t have microcephaly. Confirmation of the diagnosis requires not just small head circumference, but small brain size and a decreased rate of brain growth. Consequently, it is quite likely that many of these cases will be reclassified as not having the condition.

Content from external source

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2...he-conspiracy-theories-flow-fast-and-furious/

 

[Dan Wilson]

I found an interesting article on ScienceBlogs.

The Nature article they mention is neat.

http://www.nature.com/news/zika-vir...ll-headed-babies-questioned-by-report-1.19259

The experts agree that the reported size of the microcephaly increase so far is probably inflated — and this chimes with the latest figures from the Brazilian government. On 27 January, it said that of 4,180 suspected cases of microcephaly recorded since October, it has so far confirmed 270 and rejected 462 as false diagnoses.

Content from external source

 

[Dan Wilson]

Science is also covering the issue.
http://www.sciencemag.org/topic/zika-virus
Here is a noteworthy and relevant article.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/zika-virus-your-questions-answered

Why has it exploded so suddenly?

There may have been big outbreaks in Africa and Asia in the past that went undetected; scientists weren't paying much attention. But the current massive epidemic was an event waiting to happen. Latin America has huge numbers of A. aegypti, also known as the yellow fever mosquito, an important vector for Zika. (The Asian tiger mosquito, A. albopictus, which is on the rise around the world, is believed to be a vector as well.) In addition, nobody in the Americas had immunity to the virus. Travel makes it worse. Aedes mosquitoes don't fly more than a few hundred meters during their lives; Zika travels from city to city and country to country when infected people get on cars, buses, trains, and planes.

These combined factors meant that the virus had the ability to spread far and fast once it had arrived.
...
Do we know for sure that Zika is causing a rise in birth defects?

No. There is strong circumstantial evidence that areas in Brazil hit hard by Zika have experienced a sharp increase in the number of babies born with microcephaly, a condition in which the head is much smaller than normal because the brain fails to develop properly. But it will take at least several months before the results from the first case-control studies of pregnant women infected with Zika are available. Doctors in Brazil first noticed an increase in cases of microcephaly during ultrasounds of pregnant women in June and July, a few months after the sudden rise in Zika infections. Fetal medicine expert Manoel Sarno, who works at the Federal University of Bahia, says the pattern of brain damage he is seeing now looks distinct from microcephaly caused by other infections, such as cytomegalovirus (CMV) or rubella. He and his colleagues started a study in August that is following women infected with Zika during their pregnancy; the results could come out late summer. Similar studies are underway elsewhere in Brazil and in Colombia.

Content from external source

 

[Miss VocalCord]

Another claim for the source for the increase in cases of microphaly:

"Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women living in areas where the Brazilian state added Pyriproxyfen to drinking water are not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health places a direct blame on the Zika virus for this damage."

Content from external source

http://www.theecologist.org/News/ne...ito_insecticide_as_cause_of_microcephaly.html



moderator add: this topic discussed in new thread https://www.metabunk.org/zika-virus...-causing-brazils-microcephaly-outbreak.t7305/

 

[JesseCuster]

I read a thread on another forum claiming that Zika is the start of the NWO's (or Illuminati or whoever) depopulation of the earth to bring the population down to under a billion.

A smaller population is easier to control and the elite can horde more of the earth's resources for themselves. Everyone from Monsanto to Bill Gates to the Rockefeller Foundation have been implicated in this conspiracy.

I've been reading for ages now about the NWO's imminent depopulation of the earth. They're clearly hopelessly incompetent because year after the world's population just keeps going up and up and up. That's the thing about conspiracies about upcoming terrible things about to be done by the UN, FEMA, NWO, etc. They never get round to actually putting any of their dastardly plans into action.

In the same thread was a rather bizarre suggestion that because there have been links suggested between Zika and microcephaly, that the plan is to use the virus to breed a new generation of small brained humans. Having smaller brains would make us stupider and even easier to be manipulated by our big brained elites.

edit: Whoops, just read the OP, conspiracy stuff shouldn't have been posted here.

 

[MikeG]

I read a thread on another forum claiming that Zika is the start of the NWO's (or Illuminati or whoever) depopulation of the earth to bring the population down to under a billion.

A smaller population is easier to control and the elite can horde more of the earth's resources for themselves. Everyone from Monsanto to Bill Gates to the Rockefeller Foundation have been implicated in this conspiracy.

I've been reading for ages now about the NWO's imminent depopulation of the earth. They're clearly hopelessly incompetent because year after the world's population just keeps going up and up and up. That's the thing about conspiracies about upcoming terrible things about to be done by the UN, FEMA, NWO, etc. They never get round to actually putting any of their dastardly plans into action.

In the same thread was a rather bizarre suggestion that because there have been links suggested between Zika and microcephaly, that the plan is to use the virus to breed a new generation of small brained humans. Having smaller brains would make us stupider and even easier to be manipulated by our big brained elites.

edit: Whoops, just read the OP, conspiracy stuff shouldn't have been posted here.

Here you go:

https://www.metabunk.org/gmo-mosquitoes-spreading-zika-virus.t7251/#post-175074

 

[Hama Neggs]

There was a guy on the Art Bell (Heather Wade) called Dr Bill Deagle and couple nights ago. I didn't catch it all or very clearly due to having the flu and trying to sleep, but he said something like "weaponized" in relation to what happens to the virus(?) over time.

In the end, he even freaked out host Heather by exposing himself as a conspiracy theorist of the highest(lowest?) degree. He brought up everything including 911, which he said was done with some sort of chain of nukes or something, OKC bombing, where he said military explosives were involved, to Sandy Hook.

Heather Wade even began asking: "How do you know that?" several times. Sorry I can't provide better details. The guy is a fundamentalist Christian, it seems, and has been all about prophecy of doom, etc, for a long time.

 

[Whitebeard]

these type of claims do make me laugh, albeit in a sadly sardonic sort of way.

Humanity has suffered plagues and the like for millennia. Black Death anyone? Typhoid or yellow fever? Spanish flu? In the more religious times of the past these were either the work of the devil or gods judgement. People would flock to church, pray like ballyhoo and give thanks when the epidemic burnt itself out, as they nearly always do given time.

However these days in the west at least, we are a mainly secular society, where we live in more enlightened times, and majority of folks understand the way pandemics work, if only on a base level. Hell, there are even a series of quite entertaining flash computer games that explain the basics...

http://www.gamingdelight.com/games/pandemic.php
http://www.addictinggames.com/strategy-games/pandemic2.jsp
http://pandemic3.com/
(3 is not out of beta yet, but the release is imminent)

But stuff like death my ebola or zika mutated kids is still scary, and to those who already have a 'faith' in conspiracy and a distrust in science and authorities they are perfect prods into a form of neo-religious behaviour where Bill Gates and the rest of the NWO-lizard people elite replace the evil demons and David Icke and the rest of the conspiracy gurus become replacements for god. They think that by trusting in their gurus and by preaching their 'this the work of our modern day demons' mantras they will make a difference and if they can't stop the plagues then at least they will die knowing they have done their mentors 'good works'. Then when the pandemic burns out, they will claim it is their exposure of 'the truth' that cased the elite to stop their nefarious doings.

However the really sad thing is, they fail to see what really causes these pandemics to spread and be so devastating. The poverty, the lack of clean water, the social inequality etc, and if they put half the effort they expend on spreading their gurus bunk into addressing the real cause of these outbreaks, then something positive may well result. But sadly that would involve understanding real science and living in the real world, things the CT crowd don't believe in and don't want to do.

 

[Dan Wilson]

Evidence is continuing to mount that Zika could in fact be responsible for microcephaly cases and other neurodegenerative problems.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/zika-virus-kills-developing-brain-cells

The virus readily infected the neural stem cells, neuroscientists Hongjun Song and Guo-li Ming, virologist Hengli Tang, and their colleagues report today in Cell Stem Cell. Three days after the virus was applied, 85% of the cells in the culture dishes were infected. In contrast, when the virus was applied to cultures of fetal kidney cells, embryonic stem cells, and undifferentiated iPS cells, it infected fewer than 10% of the cells by day 3.

Content from external source

We still don't have a causative link, as these experiments were done in a culture dish and, as always, it is hard to make clinically relevant conclusions based on experiments done in a dish. The point here is that Zika is a continuing to be a more plausible explanation for these outbreaks than what the many conspiracy theories suggest.