A woman’s plight in Venezuela:
Carolina, who lives on the vertiginous hills of a Caracas slum, says she fell pregnant with her third child last year because birth control pills went scarce.
When the mosquito-borne virus Zika – linked to severe birth defects in thousands of babies in Brazil – started to spread through the Americas the homemaker, now seven months pregnant, set out to protect herself.
But repellent is also running short in crisis-hit Venezuela. And as water cuts are frequent in the slums, people keep reserve jars in store at home, a potential breeding ground for mosquitoes.
“I keep the doors closed. I can’t do much more,” said Carolina, 30, as she waited in line for a check-up at a state-run maternity center in southern Caracas…
Many doctors and health activists worry that the country will be ill-equipped to fight the virus as it grapples with economic crisis and constant shortages of consumer goods and medicines. With no vaccine or cure for the virus, much of the fight against the outbreak is going to depend on protecting people from mosquito bites and reducing the mosquito population.
“We’re exposed like no other country in Latin America for this to be a pandemic,” said Huniades Urbina, president of the Venezuelan Paediatrics Society, who is critical of the leftist government of Nicolas Maduro.
Free resource availability keeps disease at bay in all sorts of ways. Once that firewall breaks down, it will be one more factor helping the next pandemic to find the tools it needs to sweep through the population. Ruling out pandemic would be a huge mistake.
Apocalypse comes in many flavors.
This Zika is really scary. We should be working overtime to wipe out this virus, the mosquito or whatever we have to do to stop it.
There’s a process called Gene drive that could be used to get rid of them all. I wonder if it’s time to just do away with mosquitoes altogether. Other animals eat them but surely their are other bugs they can eat.
On the other hand, Zika could be nature’s way of saving us from full on night of the lepus.
I think Tex is right, this one can be blamed on conspiracy types. I don’t know what their game is though, maybe this is a test run.
I say this because the shortages are artificial: https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/what-is-causing-the-shortages-in-venezuela/
It could just be coincidence, but then I remember that financial elites are working on culling the population to 500 million. Sounds like the book of Revelations.