Free Republic

Areas of Miami, Florida, are now being sprayed with the insecticide naled in an attempt to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito — carrier of the zika virus. Naled, a potent neurotoxin that kills mosquitoes on contact, is perfectly safe, or so the Environmental Protection Agency insists, despite Puerto Rico’s rejection of its use to combat the spread of zika there — due to concerns about its safety. To keep naled airborne where it would be most effective, the agent is sprayed in very fine aerosol droplets — about two tablespoons can be dispersed to cover an area the equivalent of...

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Utah man who became the first person in the continental U.S. to die after being infected with the Zika virus passed it to a caregiver, creating a medical mystery about how it spread between them, health officials said Monday. The two people did not have sexual contact and the type of mosquito that mainly spreads the virus is not found in the high-altitude area where they live, the Salt Lake County Health Department said. The caregiver is a "family contact," but officials did not give further details, including how the virus was transmitted. "Our...

Brazil's microcephaly epidemic continues to pose a mystery...if Zika is the culprit, why are there no similar epidemics in other countries also hit hard by the virus? In Brazil, the microcephaly rate soared with more than 1,500 confirmed cases. But in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases? Perhaps there is another reason for the epidemic in Brazil. According to a new report by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), the number of missing cases in Colombia and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that it is monitoring 320 U.S. pregnant women with laboratory evidence of Zika virus infection, up from 287 women a week earlier. However, the number of babies born in the United States with birth defects linked to Zika infection in mothers during pregnancy, or lost pregnancies linked to the virus, remained unchanged from last week's report at 7 and 5, respectively, according to a CDC registry created last month. The registry compiles poor outcomes of pregnancies with laboratory evidence of possible Zika virus infection in the...

Scientists have discovered a mcr-1 "superbug" gene in a sample of E.coli bacteria from a New York patient, making it the second reported case of superbug infection in the United States.According to a report from Reuters, the discovery was made after the researchers analyzed 13,525 Escherichia coli and 7,481 Klebsiella pneumoniae strains from patients collected last year as part of the global effort called the SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program. These patients came from hospitals in the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America, Europe and North America. Out of the thousands of analyzed strains, about 1.9 percent or 390 were resistant to colistin,...

Online backup company Carbonite is the latest firm to have issued a warning that hackers are attempting to break into its users accounts, and are prompting all users to change their passwords as a result. An email has been sent to Carbonite users explaining that the attackers are thought to be using passwords gleaned from other recent mega-breaches. ... Nobody is keen for a hacker to break into their online accounts, but it's especially important when what's being protected by your account is your computer backup. If a hacker were able to gain access to your online backup they could...

Security researchers have uncovered new malware targeting industrial control systems that uses similar techniques to those employed by the infamous Stuxnet worm. Infosec firm FireEye today published a report on the 'Irongate' malware it discovered at the end of last year. The researchers found the malware within the database of the Google-owned VirusTotal website, which allows users and security researchers to submit suspicious files for scanning by antivirus software. Two samples of Irongate had been uploaded in 2014 by different sources, the researchers said, but had not been flagged as malicious by any antivirus vendors' scanners. FireEye only discovered the...

A flesh-eating tropical disease is ravaging the war-torn Middle East, after Islamic State destruction created the ideal breeding conditions.

I am no radical but I signed it....

On 21 January 2016, the National IHR Focal Point of Angola notified WHO of an outbreak of yellow fever (YF). The first case with onset date on 5 December 2015 was identified in Viana municipality, Luanda province. As of 7 April 2016, a total of 1,708 suspected cases, including 238 deaths (CFR: 13.9%), had been reported from 16 of the country’s 18 provinces. >snip< A total of 581 cases have been laboratory confirmed in 59 districts of 12 provinces. >snip< The risk of spread to other provinces and to neighbouring countries remains very high. Transmission of the disease is no...

A new study has found that almost half the people who pick up a USB stick they happen across in a parking lot plug said drives into their PCs.Researchers from Google, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Michigan, spread 297 USB drives around the Urbana-Champaign campus. They found that 48 percent of the drives were picked up and plugged into a computer, some within minutes of being dropped. "The security community has long held the belief that users can be socially engineered into picking up and plugging in seemingly lost USB flash drives they find," the researchers...

Symptoms Most people infected with Zika virus won’t even know they have the disease because they won’t have symptoms. The most common symptoms of Zika are fever, rash, joint pain, or conjunctivitis (red eyes). Other common symptoms include muscle pain and headache. The incubation period (the time from exposure to symptoms) for Zika virus disease is not known, but is likely to be a few days to a week. See your healthcare provider if you are pregnant and develop a fever, rash, joint pain, or red eyes within 2 weeks after traveling to a place where Zika has been reported....

Maine Gov. Paul LePage, who endorsed Donald Trump for president last Friday, claimed on Wednesday that Ted Cruz, like his Canadian-born daughters, is ineligible to be the president. Asked on The Howie Carr Show why he endorsed Trump over Ted Cruz, LePage replied, “Very simple. It’s very simple. I am the most conservative governor that there is. He’s a first time senator. He’s not ready. Number one. Number two is I also have two daughters who were born in Canada. They had to be naturalized. They couldn’t be natural. And so, I have a question there.”

One of the world's leading virologists has warned against public hysteria surrounding the Zika virus, saying global health authorities need to focus more broadly on prevention of infectious diseases rather than finding a cure for specific outbreaks. Leslie Lobel, an Israeli physician who has worked with the US military and the Uganda Virus Research Institute to try to find a vaccine for Ebola, believes ...the evidence is not yet conclusive. "it's not clear that what's going on in Brazil is linked to the Zika virus. There's no definitive proof that Zika is causing microcephaly. I believe the hysteria is way...

Large numbers of babies with borderline normal head sizes were born in Brazil as far back as 2012, two years before the Zika virus is thought to have entered the country, say researchers searching for answers to urgent questions. Pediatric cardiologist Dr. Sandra Mattos had been collecting data on 100,000 newborns in the Brazilian state of Paraiba as part of her work studying and treating congenital heart disease. The microcephaly fears linked to the Zika virus drove her team to check back into hospital records for head circumferences of more than 1,600 babies born in the state in the last...

The Internet Archive has opened a new collection dubbed the Malware Museum that lets you run old DOS-era viruses in your web browser. There are 78 samples to play with, all uploaded earlier today and collated by Mikko Hypponen and Jason Scott. The cheesy old code is executed in your browser using a JavaScript version of emulator DOSbox. Much to our delight, there some classics in the museum, particularly Casino. Running these cyber-fossils will take you back to the bad old days when code could do anything it liked on machines -- security wasn't a consideration at all. As such,...

It is obvious that no significant connection between microcephaly and the Zika virus has been found. It's not even close. So far, therefore, there is absolutely no reason to trumpet an epidemic of Zika. Doing so is quite insane, by any reasonable standard. Here are the principal facts in the article (after which I'll comment): * As of January 30, 2016, 4,783 suspected cases of microcephaly were reported in Brazil. * Of those, 3,670 suspected cases of microcephaly, covering the entire country of Brazil, are being investigated. * Of those 3,670, 404 cases have been confirmed as microcephaly or "other...

The Zika virus has been known to infect people in Africa, South and Central America and Asia for more than 70 years without causing any birth defects. The Brazilian government declared an emergency in December after 2,400 babies were found to be born with shrunken heads and brain defects believed to be linked to mosquitoes carrying the Zika Virus. The number of babies born with the defects has been rising significantly since then. But could there be a link between the introduction of the Tdap vaccination that women in Latin America were urged to get before they were 22 weeks...

But a few experts feel the prospect is disturbing enough that federal health officials should inform all travelers, not just pregnant women, of the potential danger. On Monday, the Pan American Health Organization warned that Zika virus is likely to spread to every country in the Americas except Canada and Chile.

The first known case of Zika virus transmission in the United States was reported in Texas on Tuesday by local health officials, who said it likely was contracted through sex and not a mosquito bite, a day after the World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency. The virus, linked to severe birth defects in thousands of babies in Brazil, is spreading rapidly in the Americas, and WHO officials on Tuesday expressed concern that it could hit Africa and Asia as well. Zika had been thought to be spread by the bite of mosquitoes of the Aedes genus, so...