Mosquitoes strike again - this time it's zika

First there was malaria, then yellow fever, then dengue (see my post of 31 July 2013), then it was chikungunya (see my post of 21 May 2014), now it is zika – all of them spread by mosquitoes. In the case of zika, now moving through Latin America and the Caribbean, it is the same mosquito (see picture) that spreads dengue and yellow fever.

If a pregnant woman is infected with zika, it is believed the virus can cause her baby to have an abnormally small head – a condition known as microcephaly, which is often caused by the failure of the brain to develop at its usual speed. Nearly 4,000 such babies have been born in Brazil since October, and 49 have died.

A number of countries including Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Jamaica, have advised women to delay becoming pregnant until more is known about the disease, which was first identified in Africa in the 1940s. Some believe it was introduced to Brazil during the World Cup in 2014.

There is no known cure for zika, and the only way to prevent it is to avoid being bitten by the mosquitoes that carry it. In Brazil, they are working to clear stagnant water where the insects breed.

The war on drugs - Jamaica

Seldom has the “war on drugs” been seen in more graphic action than on the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, as security forces try to arrest, at the United States’ request, the alleged narcotics baron Christopher “Dudus” Coke. 73 people have now been killed, and, as in so many wars, most of them appear to have been civilians.

The toll is mounting towards that recorded in the island’s worst disaster of the last 100 years – Hurricane Charlie in 1951, which claimed 152 lives.

It is not clear whether Coke is still in his Tivoli Gardens stronghold, but he appears to have support from many in the area who regard him as a benefactor to the dispossessed ignored by the government. Some local people have been shouting “murderers” at Jamaican soldiers.

The battle has revived the question of whether criminalisation is the best way to combat the drugs trade, or whether, however well-meaning, the policy is as disastrous as was the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920’s.

Smallpox

On this day…..261 years ago, Edward Jenner, the man who discovered the smallpox vaccine, was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. Jenner discovered that by infecting someone with the much milder cowpox virus, you could protect them against smallpox, which had been killing an estimated 400,000 Europeans a year.

The disease had done its cataclysmic worst, though, in the New World, where native populations were completely lacking in immunity. The Spanish conquistadores terrified the Indians with their fire-spitting guns, but actually the smallpox virus was the deadliest weapon they brought.

It began in the early sixteenth century by cutting a swath through the populations of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba. Then Hernan Cortes took it with him to Mexico, and when the Aztecs tried to resist him, they were cut down by the virus, and “died in heaps, like bedbugs.”

The Incas met a similar fate, with their great king, Huayna Capac, among those who died. Smallpox, helped by other imported illnesses, like mumps and measles, would reduce their numbers from seven to just one million. (See also my blog of Nov 6.)