After months of anticipation, the Zika virus has finally arrived to the continental U.S., with 15 non-travel cases being reported in Florida as of August 2. The virus is carried primarily by a species of mosquito called Aedes aegypti.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued its first-ever warning for within the U.S., urging pregnant women to avoid travel to a Miami neighborhood where the Zika investigation is centered.
CDC and the Florida Health Department recommended an aerial spraying program to cover a 10-square-mile area just north of downtown Miami.
The state is spraying a chemical called Naled, which is an organophospate pesticide that causes severe skin and eye irritation; it also contains an inert ingredient called napthaline which is classified by the EPA as a “possible human carcinogen.”
When this chemical was recommended to be sprayed in Puerto Rico, protests erupted from residents concerned about their health and the environmental impacts.
Organophosphate pesticides also devastate bee populations and other beneficial insects, which affects agriculture as well as ecosystem health.
Governments are often quick to pour chemicals into the environment as a first reaction, as it gives the appearance of “doing something” and enriches chemical companies who contribute to political campaigns.
So, with 15 cases of Zika and sustained media fear-mongering, the first government-sponsored spraying program has begun in Florida.
According to the CDC, for most people the Zika virus causes mild symptoms of fever, rash, joint pain, red eyes, muscle pain and headache that last up to a week.
Many patients don’t even know they have it, as it is like symptoms of other common sicknesses. Hospital visits are rare, and death very rare.
The bigger fear is the purported link between Zika virus in pregnant women and microcephaly in the baby.
However, as we reported on July 2, the only country experiencing an abnormally high rate of microcephaly is Brazil, where doctors insist that a larvacide called pyriproxyfen could be a factor in microcephaly.
Colombia is also experiencing a Zika virus outbreak, but there is no connection between Zika virus and microcephaly in that country.
“Of the nearly 12,000 pregnant women with clinical symptoms of Zika infections until March 28, no cases of microcephaly were reported as of May 2.”
Five new cases of microcephaly with Zika infections were found prior to June 18 in Colombia; however, this is still consistent with the random co-occurrence of each of the separate conditions.
Back in Brazil, the expected “explosion” of cases where brain defects are linked to Zika virus has not occurred.
Defying predictions, most of the cases have remained clustered in the northeast region, which has caused Brazil to open a probe into the possibility of co-factors such as other viruses or environmental factors.
The story of Zika-carrying mosquitoes gets even more interesting when we delve into history. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the U.S. military is involved.
An investigation by Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscura found that in the 1950s, the U.S. was seeking to weaponize the Aedes aegypti mosquito while Brazil and other Latin American countries were trying to eradicate it.
“At Fort Detrick, the military’s biological weapons base in Maryland, in great secret, Army scientists were considering how fleas, grasshoppers, and mosquitoes might be deployed against the Communist threat.
“These insects were harder to protect against than gas — masks wouldn’t help. The threat they posed would last, as long as a population of insects remained alive. Plus, it would be very difficult to pin an insect-borne attack on the U.S.
“Among these possible insect soldiers, A. aegypti was “the golden child,” writes Jeffrey A. Lockwood, in Six-Legged Soldiers, because the disease it carried, yellow fever was so terrible.
“The Army Chemical Corps, in a 1959 report, notes that yellow fever is “highly dangerous” and that “since 1900, one-third of patients have died.”
“There were parts of the Soviet Union that had never been exposed to the disease, 