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To: Smokin' Joe
Contain the virus by stopping the vector

I wonder if that works anymore. With high-density populations in deforested and swampy areas and mass migrations of people from war-torn and otherwise impoverished areas, isn't the spread of disease inevitable? These are diseases that diminish a person's physical and mental capacities for life. It's straight out of Science Fiction.

Add to that the Olympics in very dirty, mosquito-laden and overpopulated areas of Brazil, and YIKES!

10 posted on 04/06/2016 1:27:29 AM PDT by grania
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To: grania

Zika, I believe, doesn’t spread from person to person. Yet. But lots of other diseases do.


12 posted on 04/06/2016 1:37:16 AM PDT by firebrand
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To: grania
I wonder if that works anymore.

To some extent it does. If there is no means of transmitting the virus, the virus dies with the hosts.

Because this virus is sexually transmitted, too, and possibly through blood products (as yet not addressed), it may never be wiped out. Even vaccines are not 100% effective.

Similarly, mosquitoes are remarkably tenacious critters, and even if flushed out of low lying areas by a flood will return in a matter of a few years to former levels (as happened in the Missouri River bottoms here a few years ago).

However, reducing the vector (mosquito population) reduces opportunities for transmission; the more effectively the population of conveying insects is reduced, the fewer people will get the disease. That requires not just the use of pesticides, but effectively reducing breeding areas, too.

The rest is human behaviour, and that remains a wild card.

18 posted on 04/06/2016 5:26:59 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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