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Zika Virus Outbreak Prompts CDC To Expand Travel Advisory (washingtonpost.com)
turkeydance writes: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is asking pregnant women to avoid 22 countries that have seen outbreaks of the Zika virus. That's up eight from just yesterday. Disturbingly, the mosquito-borne virus, which may be causing abnormally small heads in newborns, has also been linked to yet another debilitating disease. The Zika virus has been spreading rapidly over the past several months, most prominently in Brazil. Its spread has been associated with a dramatic increase in microcephaly, a rare condition in which babies are born with abnormally small heads.
... which isn't mentioned in the summary. It's apparently the Guillain-Barre syndrome.
It's because they don't care about children. Don't care about children.
The CDC's budget was over $7,000,000,000 last year, and they have 15,000 employees. Sounds like they do care. I used to work for the CDC Foundation which is an independent nonprofit associated with the CDC. When we needed money for things that had a ROI, it wasn't the Democrats that supported us.
And, why do liberals always repeat themselves?
Nice, editors.
which may be causing abnormally small heads in newborns,
a rare condition in which babies are born with abnormally small heads.
This message messaged to you by the redundant department of redundancy department.
Truman didn't create it. It was originally created from the Malaria Commission which was created by John D. Rockefeller, and then renamed to the CDC. He was the richest American that ever lived, so there's probably not a single person that was more Republican than him. You just know he hated the average person.
1. The Zika virus has been Africa and Southeast Asia since forever.
2. They don't seem to have microcephalic cases like Brazil has.
3. The virus was introduced into Brazil sometime around 2015.
4. 2015 Brazil sees a 10x increase in microcephalic cases.
So far that seems compelling that Zika is causing the cases. But why aren't we seeing the same thing in Africa or Asia? It's not like the Zika virus in Brazil has had thousands of years to mutate into a version that causes microcephaly, but not the original strain in Africa and Southeast Asia. It's the same virus.
It's not like the people in Brazil don't have the same "immunity" that people in Africa and Southeast Asian people have -- a large percentage of the Brazilian people *have* West African ancestors where the Zika virus has been found.
Here's an alternate hypothesis: some kind of chemical has been introduced into Brazil in 2015 that's causing the birth defects. Maybe a pesticide that hasn't been properly tested, or a morning sickness drug that wasn't tested.
Citations:
For pesticides and birth defects: http://www.counterpunch.org/20... http://americanpregnancy.org/p... and http://www.beyondpesticides.or...
Pesticides and microcephaly: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... and http://www.gmls.eu/beitraege/1...
For morning sickness drugs: http://www.aboutkidshealth.ca/...
Thank you for that. So Guillain-Barre and microcephaly (abnormally small small heads), not to be confused with bureaucracy (abnormally small brains).
No. The little bastards have abnormally large heads.
Signed
Mothers Everywhere
"Debilitating"? To the contrary, that's exactly the adaptation I would want if *I* were forced to stick my head up there like that.
I've seen in the news items of women who were tested for Zika after microcephaly, but that's just confirmation basis (sic).
It's incomplete data, but it isn't confirmation bias.
If the researchers were taking tests of women who gave birth to microcephalic babies, and Zika was not the cause, you'd expect that the women being tested would have some closer-to-even distribution between Zika infected and non-Zika infected, given a suitable sample size.
Now if the testing were done the other way around (checked for microcephaly only in women known to have had the Zika virus), then you'd potentially have confirmation bias if the results appeared to show a correlation. The problem you'd run into here is that without checking against the birth results of mothers who didn't have Zika, you wouldn't know if there were some other cause for the microcephaly.
This of it this way. If you went to a village and rounded up every mother who had a microcephalic baby, and you found that 99+% of them had Zika, there is no confirmation bias. You'd still want to determine how many other mothers infected with Zika had non-microcephalic babies, and you'd further need to determine when during pregnancy the Zika infection began (as it's possible that microcephaly only occurs if caught at or before a certain point of gestation), but the result would point to possible avenues for research.
If, however, you rounded up all of the women who had Zika during their pregnancy, and found that 80% of them had microcephalic babies and stopped there, then you'd have a case of confirmation bias. It could turn out that 80% of non-Zika infected mothers also had microcephalic babies. That is confirmation bias. What you called "confirmation bias" is good research methods. It's certainly not the end of the research, but correlations are not confirmation biases in and of themselves.
Yaz