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posted by takyon on Sunday July 31 2016, @08:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the go-local-movement dept.

[...] Florida Department of Health confirmed this morning that there's a "high likelihood" that local transmission of Zika has occurred in the United States for the first time

[...] The four cases appear to have been infected in early July just north of downtown Miami in an area of about 2.5 square kilometers, the Florida health department reported after doing intensive investigations to rule out the possibility that the patients were infected by traveling to affected countries or via sex with infected people.

[...] Scientists had predicted that Zika would gain a foothold in Florida this year, based on the heavy volume of travel from Latin America and the presence of A aegypti mosquitoes that can transmit the virus. There have already been nearly 400 cases of travel-related, or "imported" Zika in Florida, which increased the odds that a mosquito would bite an infected person and transmit it to others.

[...] Other viral diseases spread by the same mosquitoes—including dengue and chikungunya—that have caused massive epidemics south of the U.S. border have triggered only small outbreaks in the United States. Scientists cite a variety of factors for the marked difference, including lower mosquito densities and the fact that people spend more time inside.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/zika-has-gained-foothold-florida-unlikely-become-widespread-united-states


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 01 2016, @01:40PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 01 2016, @01:40PM (#382608)

    It's like they don't want to admit that the USA cannot control the pathogen

    Maybe the bucket chemists will save us.

    One cool effect of knowing enough chemistry to be dangerous is its fascinating watching the bucket chemists in the unlicensed pharmaceuticals industry do ever more elaborate organic chemistry synthesis as more and more precursors get banned. Eventually we're gonna have drug labs where water, air, electricity and charcoal get pumped in one door and fun stuff comes out the other but I digress.

    Anyway we know how to control mosquitoes with some pretty brutal sprays that unfortunately kill birds and fish and sometimes people and F only knows what else (bees?). And we regulate the hell out of those chemicals which are in demand. So it seems inevitable that the guys who are currently synthesizing all manner of fun times chemicals will eventually find a market to synthesize totally illegal yet somewhat effective DDT and friends.

    I mean, given the choice of totally Fing useless aromatherapy oils from the corporate walmart world that do jack to kill mosquitoes, I have an outlaw biker neighbor (who knows not to shit where he sleeps, so I like having him around) and he probably knows a guy who could get me a couple liters of ready to spray DDT... Real good stuff man.

    Now when neighborhoods see the local unlicensed chemist as the only thing keeping them alive rather than a nuisance, that'll have an interesting long term effect on meth enforcement. Also all the songbirds will be dead, but we are better off with all the songbirds being dead than all the kids. So illegal environmental modification will be a "thing" soon enough. And what happens to civilian cooperation when the EPA moves from preventing dumping of contaminated plating solutions into the local swimming hole toward something more like trying to kill the guy dumping DDT into the local wetland which is the only reason the townfolk's kids are still alive... As always, gonna be an interesting time to be alive.

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