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The Zika Virus Is Harmless – Who Then Benefits From This Media Panic?
The media are currently creating a panic about the allegedly dangerous Zika virus:
There is absolutely no sane reason for this panic campaign.
The virus is long known, harmless and the main current scare, that the virus damages unborn children, is based on uncorroborated and likely false information.
A recent Congressional Research Service report (pdf) about Zika notes:
Zika is a virus that is primarily spread by Aedes mosquitoes [..]. Zika transmission has also been documented from mother to child during pregnancy, as well as through sexual intercourse, blood transfusions, and laboratory exposure. Scientists first identified the virus in 1947 among monkeys living in the Ugandan Zika forest. Five years later, human cases were detected in Uganda and Tanzania. The first human cases outside of Africa were diagnosed in the Pacific in 2007 and in Latin America in 2015.
The thing is just one of many thousand viruses that can effect humans. It is known. It is rather harmless. It effects, if there are any at all, are very mild:
A relatively small proportion (about 1 in 4) of infected people develop symptoms. The virus is only detectable for a few days in infected people's blood. [..]
Zika typically causes mild symptoms, including fever, rash, and conjunctivitis, which usually last up to one week. Hospitalization and death following infection are rare.
Only 1 in 4 infected people are affected and any typical flue would be more aggravating to them than this little bugger.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN????!!!!
The CRS report says:
Health experts are uncertain whether Zika causes microcephaly, a potentially severe birth defect involving brain damage. Since October 2015, Brazilian officials have reported more than 4,000 cases of microcephaly in areas with ongoing Zika transmission, up from roughly 150 cases in previous years. Health officials are concerned that this may be a result of infection in the fetus when a pregnant woman is infected.
Synopsis: We do not know if the virus harms unborn children children at all. But that number of 4,000 cases looks suspiciously high.
That is because it is false.
Microcephaly, the so called "pinhead", is not easy to diagnose. There is no standard or certain border value for the size of a newborn baby that doctors can agree on. A baby head may look too small and develop perfectly well or it may look too small and not develop perfectly. Not every case gets regularly reported. There are possible structural reason why this years number differ a lot from last years numbers. A new doctor? A new reporting system? Changed diagnosis guidelines? We do not know.
What we know is that the 4,000 cases number from Brazil that is circulating is a. misleading, b. wrong and c. unrelated to the virus.
The number is misleading because it does not give any real base like the total number of birth to which those 4,000 cases relate. According to a 2009 paper published in Neurology and quoted here:
“Microcephaly may result from any insult that disturbs early brain growth […] annually, approximately 25,000 infants in the United States will be diagnosed with microcephaly .."
Hundreds of children are born with microcephaly every day. That is sad. But it also tells us that the "big number" of 4,000 is not really that high.
It is also false.
As was reported already a week ago:
New figures released Wednesday by Brazil's Health Ministry as part of a probe into the Zika virus have found fewer cases of a rare birth defect than first feared.
Researchers have been looking at 4,180 suspected cases of microcephaly reported since October. On Wednesday, officials said they had done a more intense analysis of more than 700 of those cases, confirming 270 cases and ruling out 462 others.
So more than half of those 4,000 children reported with microcephaly do not have microcephaly. That the numbers now see such a sharp correction points to problems in the standard of diagnosis in Brazil and elsewhere. Are we sure that we have really correct numbers for earlier years to compare with the current numbers?
But what about that dangerous virus?
Six of the 270 confirmed microcephaly cases were found to have the virus. Two were stillborn and four were live births, three of whom later died, the ministry said.
Only 6 out of 270 were confirmed to have had the virus. Is that a reason to be scared? Or not? That number only tells us that the detection of this virus is rare. It does not tell us how many of the 270 have at a time been infected. It also does not tell us if such an infection has caused microcephaly or not.
But you want another scary headline? "Five out of six kids diagnosed with Zika virus died!!!"
That headline is of course also wrong. We do not know how many, if any, of the surviving kids once had the virus and got rid of it. When were those tests done? Remember that the CRS report noted:
The virus is only detectable for a few days in infected people's blood.
It is likely that the virus can be detected in a dead human body if that body was infected at the time of the death. But in a living body with a working immune system the virus will have vanished after just a few days. It is quite possible that a whole bunch of the surviving children once had the virus, that it caused no harm, and that it vanished.
There is absolutely no sane reason for the scary headlines and the panic they cause.
The virus is harmless. It is possible, but seems for now very unlikely, that it affects some unborn children. There is absolutely no reason to be concerned about it.
As this is all well known or easy to find out why do the media create this sensation?
Cui bono? Has someone a vaccine they want to sell? Is this to damage Brazil's Olympics?
Feel free to speculate.
@ wendy davis | Feb 5, 2016 7:41:43 PM | 23 &
@ Jen | Feb 5, 2016 11:35:50 PM | 39
Wendy & Jen, thanks for posting the links and background. I gotta’ say, “b” entirely missed the scary and important political, genetic, neurological, and statistical issues underlying this “ZV panic.” If he had seen that Tickell piece that Wendy links to, I think “b” ’s post would have had an entirely different flavor.
Here’s my problems w/ “b”‘s analysis of the ZV data. My next comment speculates on the frightening science.
Point 1.
b (paraphrase): ZV is harmless. Move on, nothing to see here.
Agreed, at least up until late 2015. The unmodified version of this virus is not something to be concerned about. Flu symptoms for a couple days and it’s gone. Even when a famous “outbreak” occurred in the Yap Islands in 2007 it was ho-hum. 49 confirmed cases, no deaths, not even any hospitalizations. That says the human immune system attacks ZV pretty efficiently. That is precisely why this event is scary – something has changed.
Point 2
b (paraphrase): Brazil only has 4000 microcephaly cases, but the US has 25,000, citing something called a Congressional Research Service report.
b: the 4000 number “looks suspiciously high . . . 4000 is not really that high.”
And I’m like . . . WTF, “b” ????
First of all, the original 4000 suspected microcephaly cases are not for the entire 200M pop. of Brazil, that’s with respect to the areas in which ZV is active. Comparing 4000 to 25000 is nonsense. That’s like saying there’s no poverty problem in Brazil because there are areas in Sao Paulo where average wealth is higher than the average US wealth.
One would have to know the size of the population from which the 4000 cases came in order to calculate a ratio that could be compared with incidence rates in other places. “b” sort of makes that point and then completely buries it.
Second, the striking and relevant comparison is that the 4000 number is an increase from 150 cases from the same region in the previous year. That is a valid comparison and that’s pretty scary, no matter how you look at it.
Point 3
b: “4,000 children reported with microcephaly do not have microcephaly.”
Wong again. The 4000 number was never reported as final. It includes babies identified as microcephalic in field tests. The problem is that out in the wops the doctors can only Dx microcephaly with a tape measure. By definition it’s microcephaly if the circumference of the kid’s head is more than 2 standard deviations below average. If all 4000 cases originally met that criterion, then they were properly Dx as microcephaly, at least on a preliminary basis.
That tape measure approach becomes a screening exercise. Because that method has been used for years, the jump from 150 to 4000 using the same method – or same combination of methods – is saying something.
The 270 number “b” is citing (and also the WaPo) is the number of Zika-related cases that resulted when 700 of the preliminary 4000 cases were re-examined with CT or ultrasound. And as WaPo points out, only 732 of the original 4000 were tested by CT (so far), but the percentage could go up or down when all of the 4000 are evaluated, and you could certainly see high pockets of confirmed microcephaly in certain areas when the data are broken down by regions – like regions where Oxitec’s GM mosquitos were released not long before the microcephaly outbreak.
WaPo on ZV
But let’s say that “b” is right and upon CT re-evaluation the number of microcephalics is only 50% of the 4000 originally diagnosed, or 2000. Well, one would have to presume that the 150 number from last year was 2x too high as well, and so the real problem, would be a jump from 75 cases confirmed by CT to 2000. That’s a 26x increase!!!!
Point 4
b: “Only 6 out of 270 were confirmed to have had the virus. Is that a reason to be scared?” Citing SFGate.
SFGate misstated the data. The 270 cases were those linked to ZV out of the 732 that were examined by CT. The fact that only 6 of the babies themselves tested positive for the virus probably doesn’t mean much, particularly given that the problem here may not be the virus but genes that are jumping from the mosquitos into the virus and from the virus into the humans. How many of those 270 confirmed microcephalic babies’ mothers or fathers tested positive for the virus? Presumably “linked to Zika” means at least one of the parents tested positive for Zika antibodies.
I commiserate w/ “b” – digging out the data on this ZV event is frustrating. IMO, the SFGate article (AP) and the CRS report are bunk, but not as bad as a NPR report that said the 4000 cases was the number of Zika cases, not the number of microcephaly cases.
The bottom line is this: The virus, ZV, has never been a trouble-maker and was not on WHO’s wanted-dead-or-alive list. People get it, get a fever, go home and sleep it off. Sounds like a normal Saturday night to me, especially in Rio.
But something has changed very, very suddenly, regardless of whether the number of microcephalic babies is 2000 or 4000. Nature by itself doesn’t change that radically that fast. And that’s why people are concerned about a GM gender-bender mosquito produced by a British company named Oxitec and released in Juazeiro, Brazil just before this microcephaly outbreak.
Posted by: Denis | Feb 6 2016 10:21 utc | 51
Penelope | Feb 6, 2016 12:44:33 AM | 43
“. . . the Oxitec OX513A mosquio was released for the first time or first time in Brazil in April 2015. Not so! It was released in several places including Braxil sometime prior to August 2014 . . .”
I think this is a very valid and fascinating point. There are a couple of temporal correlations that would have to be shown before a connection between OX513A – ZV – microcephaly could be established. There’s a lot of work needed.
Note that Oxitec didn’t go to all of that trouble to wipe out ZV. Nobody really gave a monkey’s butt about ZV before the hypothetical connection to microcephaly was suggested.
The OX513A mosquito was produced to combat dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, et al. viruses. I have not yet seen anyone suggest these other viruses are related to microcephaly, so if OX513A was released in 2012 in an area where dengue fever was a problem but there was no zika and no increased microcephaly – well, that’s news. And if OX513A wasn’t released in a zika area until early 2015 and that’s where the microcephaly showed up, then the temporal correlation gets very interesting.
I haven’t seen (but I’m looking, so please help if you know) any reports of these other viruses showing up in semen. If ZV is unique in this group in that respect, it’s Katy-bar-the-door. Also, the reports on ZV being found in semen aren’t saying what that means. Does in mean free-floating or inside sperm? There’s a world of difference between the two as far as the embryo goes.
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Hoarsewhisperer | Feb 6, 2016 9:01:16 AM | 58
“You’ve stated that experts have said that Oxitec couldn’t have chosen a worse transposon than piggyBac, but have failed to explain why in terms a lay person can understand.”
The problem I tried to explain is: 1) piggyBac knows no species boundaries and 2) the OCX13A mosquitoes don’t completely self-destruct in the first generation, therefore you have 5% or so, probably mostly females, that are carrying this piggyBac fuster-cluck into the environment.
Note that these mosquitoes don’t bite just humans. They suck blood from just about all available vertebrates, not even just the warm blooded ones. I once had a boa constrictor, BillBoa Baggins, who constantly had mosquitoes biting him. The GM viruses can therefore propagate in a huge reservoir of vertebrates.
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@ Debs is dead | Feb 6, 2016 10:59:32 AM | 59
“This out of a total of around 4700 reported in Brazil only a small proportion (less than 10%) have been confirmed as microcephaly. “
I believe that you, like “b” have the numbers twisted. The 270 confirmed cases of microcephaly is not out of 4000 total suspected cases; it’s out of the subset of 732 cases that got further CT analysis. 270 is 37% of 732 – if that rate holds when all 4000 cases are completely evaluated, there will be almost 1500 cases of confirmed microcephaly – from certain areas of Brazil where ZV is active. And as I said above, when those cases are broken down into regions – like where ZV has been found to be active – the rate of microcephaly may go even higher.
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b | Feb 6, 2016 1:06:54 PM | 71
“Oh boy. Please learn how a virus works before you drop further nonsense speculation here.”
Very helpful comment, “b”, thanks. Could you add some detail so we know what your problem is and what parts of piggyBac and OX513A are “nonsense?” Thanks in advance.
To help you get started I strongly suggest you read a couple of background articles by Dr. Mae-Wan Ho.
Terminator insects give wings to genome invaders
Beware the new breakthrough in transgenic mosquitoes
In the comments to that second paper there is a very informative exchange between Dr. Ho and parasitologist Dr. Paulo Andrade, who, like you, is not buying the GM mosquito panic, or at least he wasn’t 15 months before the microcephaly concerns surfaced.
I am not a virologist but my PhD is in the medical sciences and have I done a sabbatical and published research in genetics. I know, for example, that ZV is a postive single stranded RNA flavivirus. I know generally how ssRNA viral replication works. I know these viruses normally reproduce in the cytoplasm but antigens to ZV have been found in nuclei, which could be extremely significant.
At the moment I have almost 4 typed pages of notes and links on this particular issue of the possible neurotropism of this virus or – worse – of the transposon. If you would please fill me in on what more I need to know, please do.
Back on Jun04|15 you noted your impressive background – digital compression algorithms expert, masters in economics, masters in industrial engineering, German army officer — and I was, like, “wow.” But no mention of virology, genetic engineering, or any training related to transposon-related neural-tube defects.
Posted by: Denis | Feb 6 2016 20:17 utc | 76
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