Zika Quotes

“Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan. “Rumors are the lifeblood of every epidemic,” he said.”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“Mild” diseases aren’t mild for everyone, and one cynic’s false alarm is another mother’s disaster. Stay alert. And empathic.”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“a woman wasn’t pregnant, the disease was almost always mild. Getting it and recovering meant long-lasting protection. The disease itself was the perfect vaccine. And, if everyone around a woman was similarly “vaccinated,” there was no virus for mosquitoes to pick up and infect her with. What governments should really do, I thought, was ask women to wait if they could—and encourage everyone to get bitten. Yes,”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“disease itself was the perfect vaccine. And, if everyone around a woman was similarly “vaccinated,” there was no virus for mosquitoes to pick up and infect her with. What governments should really do, I thought, was ask women to wait if they could—and encourage everyone to get bitten. Yes,”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“What governments should really do, I thought, was ask women to wait if they could—and encourage everyone to get bitten. Yes,”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“And few of those calling for DDT to be revived seemed to realize that it would be a waste of time. Latin American governments had used it so intensely from 1947 to 1962 that they almost wiped out Aedes aegypti on the continent. In doing so, they almost eradicated yellow fever. But almost counts only in horseshoes and hand grenades. The genetic mutation that confers DDT resistance had emerged in Venezuela and had became fixed in the species before it spread outward from there. More”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“The spray trucks featured in so much television footage from South America were largely useless publicity ploys. Governments liked them because people found them reassuring. But against Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, relying heavily on street fogging was almost counterproductive: they bred near houses and slipped indoors as soon as they could, following the carbon dioxide vapor trail of human breath. As the trucks drove by, people closed their windows, thereby protecting the mosquitoes. TV footage of soldiers emptying standing water was also good publicity; but as soon as it rained, neighborhoods were back to square one.”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“they estimated that it had been in Brazil since mid-to-late 2013.”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“By April 2014, when the epidemic was officially over, the sentinel sites had reported 8,750 patients seeking care. The health department’s epidemiologist, Dr. Henri-Pierre Mallet, calculated that 32,000 people, or about 12 percent of the country’s population, had Zika symptoms severe enough to warrant a visit to a doctor. He”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“The virus was “neurotropic,” meaning it homed in on nerve cells, including brain cells.”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“was not ethical in 1947 for scientists to use Africans as bait. That was progress. White farmers in some parts of colonial Africa protected their cattle from tsetse fly diseases by paying “fly boys.” Tsetse flies hatch near rivers and are attracted to dark colors—including black skin. Young men—the fly boys—would stand shirtless in riverside brush, slapping dead every fly that landed on them. At day’s end, they were paid a bounty per fly. The risk they took was that tsetses carry the parasite for sleeping sickness, a human disease that leads to a horrible death. It”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“It is the only mosquito-borne virus that is also sexually transmitted.”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic

“It is the only mosquito-borne virus that routinely crosses the placenta to kill or cripple babies. Scientists”
― Donald G. McNeil, Zika: The Emerging Epidemic