If you haven’t noticed, the new world health crisis is the Zika virus transmitted via the common mosquito:
There’s another big health concern that’s all over the news, and it’s behind this week’s Words You’ll Hear. That’s the segment where we try to understand stories we’ll be hearing more about in the coming days by parsing some of the words associated with those stories. Today, our word is Zika. That’s the name of a mosquito-borne virus that’s been detected in parts of the Caribbean and Central and South America, especially in Brazil, where it’s being blamed for a spike in birth defects. The Centers for Disease Control has issued travel advisories for women who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant.
You’re humble contributing editor suggests a single course of action.
A 1978 National Cancer Institute report concluded—after two years of testing on several different strains of cancer-prone mice and rats—that DDT was not carcino-genic.36 As for the DDT-caused eggshell thinning, it is unclear whether it did, in fact, occur and, if it did, whether the thinning was caused by DDT, by mercury, by PCBs, or by the effects of human encroachment.16,37 And as recently as 1998 researchers reported that thrush eggshells in Great Britain had been thinning at a steady rate 47 years before DDT hit the market; the researchers placed the blame on the early consequences of industrialization.
By all means, let’s ban a cure saving millions of life for … well, for nothing.