Zika Virus Spread Alarm in Americas

[wolram]

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rapid-spread-zika-virus-americas-raises-alarm

A worrying little known virus that in some people
has no symptoms but can cause birth defects,( small head an under developed brain).
Is this going to go to other warm countries with mosquitoes?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Getting big time national news now. Expected to hit the states very soon.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

The Zika virus outbreaks in South and Central America are quite severe, even prompting El Salvador to recommend that no one in the country gets pregnant until 2018:

El Salvador on Thursday urged women in the Central American nation to avoid getting pregnant until 2018 to avoid their children developing birth defects from the mosquito-borne Zika virus which has rampaged through the Americas.

The Zika virus is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is also known to carry the dengue, yellow fever and Chikungunya viruses. Health experts are unsure why the virus, which was first detected in Africa in 1947 but unknown in the Americas until last year, is spreading so rapidly in Brazil and neighboring countries.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...pregnancies-until-2018-as-zika-virus-spreads/

Because Zika relies on mosquitoes for transmission, it has the potential to spread and affect countries where other mosquito-borne diseases are prevalent. Perhaps this might spur conversations about using gene drive technologies to combat mosquito-borne illness, especially given the fact that we are probably a decade away from there being a vaccine for Zika virus.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

My question is whether it can have an effect if a female contracts the virus while not pregnant but becomes pregnant a year or two later.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

My question is whether it can have an effect if a female contracts the virus while not pregnant but becomes pregnant a year or two later.

From the Centers for Disease Control:

If a woman who is not pregnant is bitten by a mosquito and infected with Zika virus, will her future pregnancies be at risk?
No. If infected Zika virus usually remains in the blood of an infected person for about a week. The virus will not cause infections in a baby that is conceived after the virus is cleared from the blood.

http://www.cdc.gov/zika/pregnancy/question-answers.html

 

[jim mcnamara]

To the best of my knowledge while the viral infection has duration, it is not permanently causing a disease process. It will eventually be endemic in the US:
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_156876.html - which obviates the travel warning in the future I guess.

The article very clearly recommends no travel for women who are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. I take that to mean women exposed to the disease in the past are not at risk. It would be nice if there were some explicit declarative statements around that claim, IMO, with some data to back it up. Anybody have a link?

The virus is a Flavivirus related to West Nile virus. There are no immunizations available for either virus. The reason to mention West Nile is that it was first reported in 1999 and very quickly spread to the lower 48 states. The new range for Zika disease will be limited to the distribution of the mosquito vector, Aedes spp. This range will be the same as West Nile, also spread by Aedes spp.

I see @Ygggdrasil posted a link above. Thank you sir.

 

[gjonesy]

It seem like vector-born disease is starting to become a problem for the US, West Nile, dengue, and chagas, have all made their way into the states. It make me wonder whether we should have all individuals entering the US health screened before being allowed to stay in the country. I know its not practical or humanitarian BUT innocent people will suffer and possibly die because there is no barrier in place.

 

[mfb]

Is it possible to get infected again if you had the virus before?
If not, there is an alternative future evolution that is not too bad.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Is it possible to get infected again if you had the virus before?

Infected individuals would probably develop immunity and be resistant to subsequent infection. Zika virus is common in Africa and Asia and presumably does not cause problems in pregnant women in those areas because women in those areas had probably been infected as children and developed immunity. Zika virus is related to yellow fever, for which there is a vaccine, and dengue, for which a vaccine will soon be available, so there is no reason to think that Zika virus would be any different.

 

[Monsterboy]

Infected individuals would probably develop immunity and be resistant to subsequent infection.

How many strains of this virus do we know of? if we are immune to one strain ,we can still be at risk of getting infected by others right ? i read something similar about Ebola.

 

[gjonesy]

How many strains of this virus do we know of? if we are immune to one strain ,we can still be at risk of getting infected by others right ? i read something similar about Ebola.

A mutated strain or different strain may not produce the same problem this one presents, for example a different strain may just cause mild flu like symptoms with no incidents of risk of birth defect...on the other hand it could evolve to create something akin to dengue fever in symptom and severity. Flu virus like H1N1 can mutate when coming into contact with different Flu strains in different host species. This is something that's almost impossible to predict or prepare for.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

How many strains of this virus do we know of? if we are immune to one strain ,we can still be at risk of getting infected by others right ? i read something similar about Ebola.

There are two lineages of Zika virus, the African and Asian lineage, and the strain circulating in the Americas is most closely related to viruses from the Asian lineage that that had previously caused an outbreak in French Polynesia in 2013 (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2816%2900003-9/fulltext ). I don't know if research has been done to see whether immunity to one form of Zika virus confers immunity to all strains of Zika virus, but there are probably people working on this question as we speak.

 

[gjonesy]

There are two lineages of Zika virus, the African and Asian lineage,

Can they trade off and mutate if both strains were in one host, (spikes RNA and other characteristics) like the flu?

Just curious

 

[Ygggdrasil]

When two different strains of virus infect the same individual and trade genetic material, the process is called recombination. Flu makes recombination easy because its genome is segmented into eight different RNA molecules that co-package into a virion. Therefore, it is easy for different influenza strains to swap segments during co-infection of a host cell. Flaviviruses (like Zika virus) have all of their genetic material on a single RNA molecule, so it is probably not as easy for genetic material from different strains to recombine. There is some evidence for recombination in certain flaviviruses, like Dengue, but other flaviviruses, like Yellow Fever, appear to propagate clonally without recombination (http://jgv.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jgv/10.1099/vir.0.18660-0). Collecting sequence information from more Zika virus cases around the world should be able to shed light on whether recombination can occur between Zika virus strains.

 

[gjonesy]

mutate if both strains were in one host

(Just for clarity) my terminology is an incorrect descriptive of the process? mutation is different than recombination?
I get most of my information through old books or internet search so please forgive the terminology blunder.

Would it be correct to say that "mutation" can occur without involvement with other strains? ...and... Recombination must be accomplished by different strains trading RNA and genetic information to form New virus strains?

 

[Ygggdrasil]

(Just for clarity) my terminology is an incorrect descriptive of the process? mutation is different than recombination?
I get most of my information through old books or internet search so please forgive the terminology blunder.

Would it be correct to say that "mutation" can occur without involvement with other strains? ...and... Recombination must be accomplished by different strains trading RNA and genetic information to form New virus strains?

Mutation occurs during the replication of any virus, whether or not there are other strains present. Mutation can lead to evolution of new strains and can potentially alter both the virulence of the virus as well as its ability to be recognized by the immune system (for example, in HIV, most drug resistance comes about from mutation).

Recombination is a separate process from mutation and involves two strains of the same virus trading genetic material. This can sometimes generate new strains against which few individuals have immunity. For example, a bird flu might recombine with a human flu in a suitable host. Humans will not have immunity to many bird flu strains but these strains do not cause disease because they can't efficiently infect human cells. A human flu strain, on the other hand, can infect human cells just fine, but it's been around so long that many individuals' immune systems have seen a similar virus before and can mount an effective defense. Recombination between the different flu strains could create a strain that combines the worst of both strains—a virus whose surface proteins differ from most human strains, so very few would have any immunity to the strain, while at the same time having the appropriate machinery to efficiently replicate inside human cells.

 

[alw34]

It make me wonder whether we should have all individuals entering the US health screened before being allowed to stay in the country.

We should let anyone in unchecked who wants to come?

Then our mosquitoes can bite them, become infected, and spread the disease here.

"Easy peasy" decision for those who want to weaken the US. "There's a growing health concern over illegal immigrants bringing infectious diseases into the United States. Approximately 500,000 legal immigrants and 80,000 refugees come to the United States each year, and an additional 700,000 illegal immigrants enter annually, and three-quarters of these illegal immigrants come from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Legal immigrants and refugees are required to have a medical examination for migration to the United States, while they are still overseas. This is the responsibility of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which provide instructions to the Panel Physicians who conduct the medical exams...

http://sma.org/illegal-immigration-and-the-threat-of-infectious-disease/

 

[Jon Richfield]

The Zika virus outbreaks in South and Central America are quite severe, even prompting El Salvador to recommend that no one in the country gets pregnant until 2018:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...pregnancies-until-2018-as-zika-virus-spreads/

Because Zika relies on mosquitoes for transmission, it has the potential to spread and affect countries where other mosquito-borne diseases are prevalent. Perhaps this might spur conversations about using gene drive technologies to combat mosquito-borne illness, especially given the fact that we are probably a decade away from there being a vaccine for Zika virus.

Just to add a note of cheerfulness, and subject to correction, because I personally have never worked in that field, the Zika virus, though generally vectored by Culicine mosquitoes such as certain species of Aedes, also has been reported as being sexually transmitted between humans and between mother and child, though the conditions for that are not yet fully defined.
I can't find where I first read that, but it is confirmed here:
http://www.cdc.gov/zika/transmission/index.html

Watch this space...

There is a book that by now is now out of date in some respects, but that I strongly recommend for several reasons. If you never have dealt with the problems of eradication of certain classes of species, you pretty certainly have some eye-openers awaiting you:
Mosquito: The Story of Man's Deadliest Foehttps://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byl...Spielman&sort=relevancerank&tag=pfamazon01-20
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byl...Spielman&sort=relevancerank&tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Just to add a note of cheerfulness, and subject to correction, because I personally have never worked in that field, the Zika virus, though generally vectored by Culicine mosquitoes such as certain species of Aedes, also has been reported as being sexually transmitted between humans and between mother and child, though the conditions for that are not yet fully defined.

Here's the reference for a documented case back in 2011 of the probable sexual transmission of Zika virus:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/04/sex-after-field-trip-yields-scientific-first
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3321795/

A U.S. vector biologist appears to have accidentally written virological history simply by having sex with his wife after returning from a field trip to Senegal. A study just released in Emerging Infectious Diseases suggests that the researcher, Brian Foy of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, passed to his wife the Zika virus, an obscure pathogen that causes joint pains and extreme fatigue. If so, it would be the http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/17/5/pdfs/10-1939.pdf.

 

[gjonesy]

We should let anyone in unchecked who wants to come?

Then our mosquitoes can bite them, become infected, and spread the disease here.

"Easy peasy" decision for those who want to weaken the US.

NO...

NO...

Absolutely N O!

That why I said they SHOULD be heath screened before being allowed to stay, I know detention and quarantine are touchy subjects for the far left. But innocent life's of the people already living here are at risk from such pratice. You can argue human rights all you want of refugees, what about the rights of the healthy population at large being put at risk from less than thrurough inadequate examinations. So what if they don't have a cough or fever? How hard is it to draw blood and do some testing before risking the life's of the population at large.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

That why I said they SHOULD be heath screened before being allowed to stay, I no detention and quarantine are touchy subjects for the far left. But innocent life's of the people already living here are at risk from such pratice. You can argue human rights all you want of refugees, what about the rights of the healthy population at large being put at risk from less than thrurough inadequate examinations. So what if they don't have a cough or fever? How hard is it to draw blood and do some testing before risking the life's of the population at large.

Similar mosquito-borne flaviviruses such as Dengue, Yellow Fever, West Nile, and chikungunya have had outbreaks in South and Central America yet have not caused substantial outbreaks in the US because of our climate and the prevalence of air conditioning. Zika virus is likely to pose little threat to the US population as we have the means to prevent serious outbreaks and limit contact with mosquitos. Furthermore, the symptoms of Zika virus are very mild (only 1 in 5 infected with the disease show symptoms, and the disease very rarely causes any serious harm beyond fever, rash, joint pain, or conjunctivitis lasting only 2-7 days). Zika virus seems to pose threats primarily to pregnant women and those individuals can take reasonable precautions to protect themselves from mosquitoes if such mosquitoes come to certain parts of the US (see http://www.cdc.gov/zika/disease-qa.html for further info). Lives are not at risk and it is inaccurate and irresponsible to suggest so. Going out onto the roads and driving poses a much greater threat to the lives of most Americans than contracting any disease from those traveling to the US from overseas. I do not believe the benefits of health screening for Zika virus would offset the significant costs associated with screening the 75 million annual international arrivals in the US.

Bad science should not be used to support overtly political statements.

 

[gjonesy]

Bad science should not be used to support overtly political statements.

This isn't political, its commonsense. NOBODY complained when ebola was a thread...so much so they band most flights to ebloa infected areas. And ebola still made it to the US. Imagine what would have happened had it gotten a foot hold here. We'd still be putting bodies in the ground had that happened

 

[Planobilly]

While some controls to prevent the spread of disease by people arriving from other parts of the world can be put in place, those controls are far from effective. People arrive legally to the United States every day with unknown medical conditions. As illegal immigration has no medical control applied and the effect is perhaps not known, the answer to to these issues most likely will not come from betters control of immigration. To assume some control could be put in place to prevent this virus from arriving is most likely wishful thinking. As the virus is thought to be transmitted by mosquito, there is at least the possibility to suppress the mosquito by chemical means. Living here in Florida I can assure you that is not easy to do...lol

If all vectors that negatively effect human health are considered, based on what I hear from the World Health Organization reports, the Zika virus currently represents a yet to be determined risk to total world health.
While the negative effect of the Zika virus are truly emotionally distressing there are many serious pressing issues that need to be solved. This is not to say that we should not take the Zika virus issue seriously. The point I am making is that we do not have unlimited resources and this issue like all issues needs to be prioritized based on true risk to global health and not the emotional context of the news media.

This is one of the statement published by the World Health Organisation.
"WHO to convene Emergency Committee on Zika virus and observed increase in neurological disorders and neonatal malformations

28 January 2016 -- WHO Director-General, Margaret Chan, will convene an International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on Zika virus and observed increase in neurological disorders and neonatal malformations. The Committee will meet on Monday 1 February in Geneva to ascertain whether the outbreak constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern"

If in fact the Zika virus proves to be "A Public Health Emergency of International Concern" it will be interesting to observe the actual actions and the results of those actions taken in regard to this issue.

Billy

 

[mfb]

This isn't political, its commonsense. NOBODY complained when ebola was a thread...so much so they band most flights to ebloa infected areas. And ebola still made it to the US. Imagine what would have happened had it gotten a foot hold here. We'd still be putting bodies in the ground had that happened

About 11000 died from the epidemy within 1.5 years in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. That roughly matches the deaths by traffic accidents in the same timeframe. A few thousand mothers died while giving birth, tens of thousands of children died before reaching their first birthday. Those didn't make it into the newspaper because they are there all the time.
I didn't find reliable numbers for HIV related deaths, but I would be surprised if they don't exceed the 11000 significantly.

Ebola had a few isolated cases in the US, but the US has a colder climate, better living conditions and a much better health system. It was easy to contain the cases. Ebola, unlike Zika, has severe health effects.

 

[Laroxe]

I was just wondering if we could screen all the mosquitoes at the borders or any traveling in aircraft or luggage, travel screening would need to be of anyone traveling abroad, it would effectively isolate America and have no real useful effect. Any infection are only detectable after a certain period of infection so you would have to isolate everyone for the incubation period and we don't even know what the next one will be or its patterns of spread, and there will be next ones. It would be an interesting and fruitless form of economic suicide.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

This isn't political, its commonsense. NOBODY complained when ebola was a thread...so much so they band most flights to ebloa infected areas. And ebola still made it to the US. Imagine what would have happened had it gotten a foot hold here. We'd still be putting bodies in the ground had that happened

Ebola is in no way comparable to Zika virus. Ebola can spread via human-to-human transmission and has very high fatality rates. Still, even when ebola cases popped up in the United States and other developed nations, our healthcare systems were able to quickly identify and quarantine the infected individuals. Since the 2014 Ebola outbreak, only two Americans have contracted Ebola from infected individuals traveling to the US, both of whom were healthcare workers. Neither died. (http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/united-states-imported-case.html) Furthermore, facilities in the US have been able to successfully treat a handful of infected individuals transported to the US after contracting Ebola in Africa. There was plenty of controversy about instituting travel bans during the Ebola outbreak, and the President's administration opposed travel bans (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/b...t-would-cut-off-worst-hit-countries.html?_r=0).

Screening travelers is appropriate in the case of easily transmissible and potentially fatal diseases like Ebola, but it is not appropriate for diseases like Zika virus.

 

[Mark Harder]

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rapid-spread-zika-virus-americas-raises-alarm

A worrying little known virus that in some people
has no symptoms but can cause birth defects,( small head an under developed brain).
Is this going to go to other warm countries with mosquitoes?

I wouldn't say infected people show no symptoms. It's a viral disease like any other and causes symptoms like headache and so forth. The problem is that when people live in mosquito-infested areas or for any other reason are exposed to mosquitoes on a regular basis, they won't associate a mild disease with a mosquito bite, unless they are well-informed about Zika. Getting pregnant while ill, or perhaps times slightly before or after becoming ill will seem like no big deal - pregnancy and illness happen all the time - and so will be ignored until it is too late.

 

[Mark Harder]

From the Centers for Disease Control:

http://www.cdc.gov/zika/pregnancy/question-answers.html

I don't think the CDC or anybody else really knows this at this time. It will take some time before epidemiological studies of this nature can be completed. After all, we are hypothesizing a phenomenon that takes weeks, months or years after an infection. Right now, CDC, WHO and others are concerned about short-term risks and prevention of birth defects and other side effects (see below). Short term prevention depends on educating people and limiting mosquito populations where people concentrate. The hypothesis and its negation are plausible, but unproven as yet.

Apropos to questions about long-term side effects is the possibility that Guillan Barre Syndrome (GBS) may result from some cases of Zika disease. There seems to be a weak correlation between GBS and Zika disease. Epidemiologists aren't convinced there is a causal connection, but they have publicly raised the possibility. GBS is not a trivial disease. It's an auto-immune diseases in which the victims make antibodies to proteins in their nerve sheaths, a little like Multiple Sclerosis. Call it MS-lite if you like. Unlike MS, it usually resolves itself over weeks to months, although survival may depend on assistance with paralysis and breathing, the absolute worst symptoms. I know something about it, because it or something with the same early symptoms happened to me. It was a medical emergency. My internist ordered me to the ER; he wouldn't even allow me to stop off for a snack on the way. I'll skip the details, but I recovered after another week. It's still not known for sure that I had GBS. I had just recovered from a "cold", which could have caused the autoimmune reaction. So following up the hypothesis that problem pregnancies can follow the mother's recovery from Zika, I wonder if the defects in fetal brain development might be caused by an autoimmune reaction to the fetus' developing nervous system. Maybe there are reasons this can't happen to a developing fetus when the mother shows no autoimmune reactions herself. I'm not a neurologist/obstetrician, so I can't say. Maybe someone else can weigh in.

 

[WWGD]

. <Snip> Lives are not at risk and it is inaccurate and irresponsible to suggest so. Going out onto the roads and driving poses a much greater threat to the lives of most Americans than contracting any disease from those traveling to the US from overseas. I do not believe the benefits of health screening for Zika virus would offset the significant costs associated with screening the 75 million annual international arrivals in the US.

Bad science should not be used to support overtly political statements.

But I am not sure this is the right perspective on this problem, if I understood you correctly. If Zika was here, then you would have the deaths by Zika _plus_ those that result from driving.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

I don't think the CDC or anybody else really knows this at this time. It will take some time before epidemiological studies of this nature can be completed. After all, we are hypothesizing a phenomenon that takes weeks, months or years after an infection. Right now, CDC, WHO and others are concerned about short-term risks and prevention of birth defects and other side effects (see below). Short term prevention depends on educating people and limiting mosquito populations where people concentrate. The hypothesis and its negation are plausible, but unproven as yet.

Based on what we know about the virus, it is very reasonable to think that there are no lasting effects after the Zika virus has been cleared from a patient's system (typically a few weeks after infection). Remember that Zika virus has been in Asia and Africa for quite a while (if was first discovered in Africa over 50 years ago), so if viral infections had long lasting effects, we likely would have seen them. While longer term studies should be performed just to make sure, there is currently no evidence and no good reason to think that Zika virus infection will effects on pregnancies occurring after the virus has been cleared from the woman's system.

But I am not sure this is the right perspective on this problem, if I understood you correctly. If Zika was here, then you would have the deaths by Zika _plus_ those that result from driving.

Zika is not associated with any significant mortality, so deaths from zika + deaths from driving = deaths from driving. Zika certainly poses risks to pregnant women, but it's worth keeping those risks in perspective, especially considering many of those risks can be mitigated by reasonable measures in the US.

 

[Sonrae]

The Zika virus outbreaks in South and Central America are quite severe, even prompting El Salvador to recommend that no one in the country gets pregnant until 2018:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...pregnancies-until-2018-as-zika-virus-spreads/

Because Zika relies on mosquitoes for transmission, it has the potential to spread and affect countries where other mosquito-borne diseases are prevalent. Perhaps this might spur conversations about using gene drive technologies to combat mosquito-borne illness, especially given the fact that we are probably a decade away from there being a vaccine for Zika virus.

I would like to understand more about the cycle in the hunan body. What kind of frequency (light, sound, electromagnetic, etc?) does it react to and what part of the body does it lodge in or is attracted to it? What supports its growth in the body? Newborn? Has the electrical system been checked? Since all diseases react or is attracted to something, the appllication of the opposite to neutralize it through chemical/light/magnetic means can be found for medicine. Problem I find is no one uses the equipment to its fullest capabilities. Example: light- God's range not man's normal light, etc.

 

[mfb]

What kind of frequency (light, sound, electromagnetic, etc?) does it react to

That question does not make sense.

Has the electrical system been checked? ]Since all diseases react or is attracted to something, the appllication of the opposite to neutralize it through chemical/light/magnetic means can be found for medicine.

That does not make sense either.

Example: light- God's range not man's normal light, etc.

What does that even mean?

 

[gjonesy]

Screening travelers is appropriate in the case of easily transmissible and potentially fatal diseases like Ebola, but it is not appropriate for diseases like Zika virus.

SO screening travelers and quarantine is perfectly expectable practice when a virus can cause a "potentially" deadly hemorrhagic fever that people have been known to fully recover from, that is short lived and easily contained. But a virus that causes a life long birth defect microcephaly (of which if you have never seen a child struggle with this its heart breaking to see ) and could pose a serious national health risk if it gets into a native vector (US aedes aegypti ) potentially affecting thousands of infants by the time it runs its course (simply because of the population density of the states). DOESNT WARENT THE SAME PRECAUTIONS? Well thanks for the wake up call and clarification I thought this was a serious health concern now my mind is totally at ease. HEY maybe we should go down to the border and hold up a banner saying welcome ZIKA enjoy your rampage. We could have a band, maybe get Obama to present it with the key to the nation...add sarcasm to taste. shake well and enjoy.

 

[jackmell]

Hi guys,
Been keeping up with your comments. This is the first reference I've seen to suggest some are convinced the virus is causing microcephaly:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/...ieved-health-minister-says.html?intcmp=hphz02

Castro said Brazilian researchers are convinced that Zika is the cause of the 3,700 confirmed and suspected cases of newborns with brain defects in Brazil.

What evidence is so convincing?

 

[Laroxe]

SO screening travelers and quarantine is perfectly expectable practice when a virus can cause a "potentially" deadly hemorrhagic fever that people have been known to fully recover from, that is short lived and easily contained. But a virus that causes a life long birth defect microcephaly (of which if you have never seen a child struggle with this its heart breaking to see ) and could pose a serious national health risk if it gets into a native vector (US aedes aegypti ) potentially affecting thousands of infants by the time it runs its course (simply because of the population density of the states). DOESNT WARENT THE SAME PRECAUTIONS? Well thanks for the wake up call and clarification I thought this was a serious health concern now my mind is totally at ease. HEY maybe we should go down to the border and hold up a banner saying welcome ZIKA enjoy your rampage. We could have a band, maybe get Obama to present it with the key to the nation...add sarcasm to taste. shake well and enjoy.

I'm afraid it simply doesn't make sense, what sort of screening would you advocate? in Ebola they used temperature which would only identify people when they were symptomatic most people would pass through this even if infected. I suspect this was more a public relations exercise rather than something useful. The only effective way of stopping infected humans coming into the country would be to isolate anyone coming in from a country with Zika for around 2 weeks. However the virus is already present in the Americas, we as yet don't know if there are other animals which can be infected. How do you stop the insects and possible other vectors crossing the border? The hope is that as the population develop immunity the disease will be self limiting, but the transition period has all the hallmarks of a real tragedy.