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Besides pregnant women it doesn't look like it is really of much concern. Lots of needless fear mongering over something that has so little effect on so few people.
From CDC: Zika virus Disease Q & A | Zika virus | CDC
But I think the risk to pregnant woman and their unborn babies warrant enough for everyone to be concerned. Because the more it spreads, the more unborn babies that can become seriously harmed.
That isn't INFO....its PROPAGANDA from a known shill....
Brownstein is a quack and any blog post of his should be given the respect it deserves...NONE
"Dr. Brownstein, in my opinion, should more properly be termed “one of America’s most popular quacks, charlatans and purveyors of misinformation in order to market useless junk.” https://theskepticalcardiologist.com...dicine-quacks/
"Brownstein being spectacularly wrong about salt and thyroid disease, and with his obvious profit motive in scaring people into buying his supplements and books, in my opinion any ideas he has about vaccination or any other medical topic is suspect." https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org...da/#more-42368
The larvicide has been used fir 20 years in 40 countries around the world with no evidence it causes birth defects of any kind.
"Dr. Ian Musgrave, a pharmacologist/toxicologist and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at the School of Medicine Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia, called the Argentine group's claim "not plausible."
"Pyriproxyfen acts by interfering with the hormonal control growth cycle of insects from hatching, to larvae, to pupa. This hormone control system does not exist in organisms with backbones, such as humans, and pyriproxyfen has very low toxicity in mammals as a result," he said.
In addition, in order to reach the threshold levels for toxicity seen in animals, 'an adult human would need to eat a teaspoon full of the raw pesticide," Musgrave said. "In terms of how much is present in water reservoirs that have been sprayed with pyriproxyfen to control mosquito larvae, a person would have to drink well over 1,000 litres of water a day, every day, to achieve the threshold toxicity levels seen in animals.'"
In addition, the birth defects are showing up in areas of Brazil that do not use pyriproxifen.
There are birth defects in all regions. It's the absence of a similar pattern of change in other areas that's raised bewilderment.
From the Washington Post article yesterday:
Instead, Zika has left a puzzling and distinctly uneven pattern of damage across the Americas. According to the latest U.N. figures, of the 2,175 babies born in the past year with undersize heads or other congenital neurological damage linked to Zika, more than 75 percent have been clustered in a single region: northeastern Brazil.
The pattern is so confounding that health officials and scientists have turned their attention back to northeastern *Brazil to understand why Zika’s toll has been so much heavier there. They suspect that other, underlying causes may be to blame, such as the presence of another *mosquito-borne virus like chikungunya or dengue. Or that environmental, genetic or immunological factors combined with Zika to put mothers in the area at greater risk.
...
But although the outbreak has spread this year to more than 50 nations and territories across the Western Hemisphere, U.N. data shows just 142 cases of congenital birth defects linked to Zika so far outside Brazil.
Pyriproxyfen has not been linked decisively to microcephaly, but there may be reason for further research. The bulk of testing on pyriproxyfen has been carried out by Sumitomo, according to Bar-Yam. He said while there was evidence the pesticide affected the brain mass of rat fetuses, the testers could say those results weren’t important because they didn’t meet certain criteria. Specifically, as doses increase, the effects must worsen. In Sumitomo tests, a dose of pyriproxyfen in the middle of the study showed more problems in rats than at later points in the study where the rats were given more of the pesticide.
“There are a lot of reasons why that might have been true, such as dosage variability or DNA variability. It’s hard to tell whether those tests are actually good tests,” Bar-Yam told Inhabitat. “Imagine if you have something that might have an effect in 1 percent of babies, or in 1 in 100 babies, if you test it only on 100 rats, you might not see the effect. In the studies they tested pyriproxyfen only on several dozen rats. It’s very hard to tell if the studies transfer from rats to people; the study is a very limited probe of what’s going on.”
...
All three experts Inhabitat spoke with said the Zika virus is likely connected to microcephaly. But the Zika virus may not be the only factor.
“It’s a little bit surprising that we would be in situation where at the same time two new things are both causing microcephaly. It’s not what you’d expect, but is it possible? Yes,” said Bar-Yam. “The point we’re making is not that we know pyriproxyfen is causing microcephaly, but that there’s a reason to look for another cause based on the available data, and there’s a reason to suspect pyriproxyfen might have a role because of its biological mechanism.”
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