The Zika virus foreshadows our dystopian climate future

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/25/zika-virus-brazil-dystopian-climate-future

by marcusgarvey • 10 years ago

5 4 10 years ago

brownbat• 10 years ago

Anyone know the why the US has such lower rates of mosquito-borne illnesses?

I know there was a big malaria eradication campaign in the middle of the 20th century that had an impact. Apparently in 1882 we had malaria not just in Florida, but straight up to North Dakota. [0]

Actually, weird, that graph makes it look like most malaria died off in the US before Müller's discoveries about DDT. How'd that happen?

My next guess would be air conditioning helping to keep people indoors, but a lot of the range of malaria died off even before that.

[0] http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html

marshray• 10 years ago

This article is garbage.

This quote:

Spread by mosquitoes whose range inexorably expands as the climate warms

is the only claim that Zika has anything to do with climate change. And it is extremely tenuous: are we just supposed to infer that Brazil had significantly fewer mosquitoes before the industrial revolution?

And now think about the larger, less intimate consequences: this is one more step in the division of the world into relative safe and dangerous zones, an emerging epidemiological apartheid.

This has been true my entire life, and far moreso in the lives of older generations. There were regions of the United States people were reluctant to go to out of fear of Malaria and Polio.

But the lack of any support for a factual connection doesn't stop them from the real point of the article: moralistic finger wagging:

But America is rich enough to avoid the worst of the mess its fossil fuel habits have helped create.

OK, sure, maybe industrialized nations did fuck up the planet's ecology. But poorly thought out appeals to emotion aren't what's going to save it.

michaelbuddy• 10 years ago

Jeez, what hyperbole. How this article gets from idea to print to posting to Hacker News shows how much various people care about clickbait and care little about their readers or reality.

xufi• 10 years ago

I'm surprised they arent hyping it up as much as Ebola was . I recently heard on the news that it will come to the US and be a massive pandemic.... Ironic its the same thing I heard when we had Ebola going on

The Zika virus foreshadows our dystopian climate future

Related Stories