scribe (5:17) — Well aware there’s Aldi stores here as they’re one of my favorite places to shop. But the U.S. has a stable currency and a good trade relationship with Germany. UK’s currency is iffy and the trade relation could change as soon as a Tory leader steps up to take PM role and kicks off the Article 50. If customers’ buying power has been seriously diminished and may remain so for +2 years, why bother hurrying construction’s completion, especially when grocery chains typically net 3-4% profit?

bloopie2 (6:41) — No, the British should have taken into account the fact their hegemonic occupation of other countries damaged relationships between people within the same land mass for more than a hundred years. Like indigenous tribes and colonists of two different countries. In retrospect, the Hawaiians should have eaten more than Captain Cook.

(6:44) You mean like the numerous cases of mail and wire fraud committed every year using mailed W-2s and tax filings? Oh yes, that’s so much better. Let’s do that instead of implementing inexpensive but effective two-factor authentication. ~smh~

P J Evans (8:27) — Yeah, that piece buried the lede, but then I may have plugged it the same way Atlas Obscura did in their tweet. Had I promoted the history, might have viewed the story differently. I didn’t find the maps as helpful — to me the kicker was that aegypti had been eradicated, and we now have them back spread across this hemisphere only because U.S. government conducted human experiments on unsuspecting civilians. Jeebus.

And now Congress can’t find its butt with both hands to muster funding to fix this self-administered mess? ~ smh ~

lefty665 (11:22) — We’ve been through this already.
(1) It’s NOT the pesticides because we’d see these same birth defects in the same rate in other parts of the world if it was, with or without Zika. Scientists have already said this.
(2) The reason Zika’s effects on humans is different between Brazil and Colombia may be two-fold: first, the disease has mutated rapidly in humans, with at least 12 mutations noted already in Brazil alone as of April this year. Second, the disease may not have spread the same way it did in Brazil which may have limited occurrences as well as monitoring of the disease and of birth defects.
(3) Zika also causes Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been more widely reported in Colombia versus Brazil. This means the virus is still a neurological agent regardless of its location.

It’s not hysteria when the statistics support the concern. Last month there were 279 pregnant women who’d tested positive for Zika and were being monitored by the CDC. As of two weeks ago six of them had given birth to or lost pregnancies due to microcephaly and other Zika-related birth defects — and we don’t know many births total out of that 279 to date let alone how many have latent defects apart from microcephaly yet to be diagnosed. This rate of microcephaly and other birth defects is absolutely unheard of, and I’ll point out if these women were in the U.S., they weren’t uniformly exposed on a sustained basis to pesticides.

IMO, based on the rate of mutations compared to sampling elsewhere, the vector which is just as problematic as Aedes aegypti mosquitoes is unprotected sex. This is something Congress should remedy by providing adequate funding for birth control, but the radical fundamentalist GOP members are more interested in radical fundamentalist votes than actually doing their jobs and protecting their most vulnerable constituents. And nearly all of them being male will never experience the Alien-like hell of wondering if they are carrying a damaged fetus that will suffer a short, excruciating life.

lefty665 — Two things, and then I’m moving on.

(1)(a) Brazilian Association of Collective Health (Abrasco) said they were quoted incorrectly on a technical note wrt mosquito control methods to fight Zika. They said,

‘at no time said that pesticides, larvicides or other chemicals are responsible for the increasing number of cases of microcephaly in Brazil.’ What the entity’s note said that she considers dangerous that mosquito control is done mainly with larvicides.

The initial misunderstanding was widely disseminated, and nobody in English-speaking enviro-blogosphere has bothered to read either Spanish or Portuguese refutation and clarification after the fact.

(1)(b) If pesticide pyriproxyfen were implicated in microcephaly, the rate of microcephaly would have increased in all countries where the chemical is used since its introduction in 1996, in sync with its use in the environment. Uptick has not happened until Zika spread in South America.

(2) Scientists in two separate studies (Report on U.S. study here, with photos | Report on Chinese study here) have directly observed Zika virus attacking lab-grown mice pups’ brain and neuro tissue.

Together, the findings indicate that the virus by itself can wreak havoc, says Michael Diamond, a viral immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri who let the Cell study. “Some people feel there are many cofactors like insecticides,” Dimond says. “Our study suggests at least you don’t have to invoke other things.” And by providing an animal model for the fetal damage, the studies should also ease the path for testing potential vaccines and treatments. (emphasis mine)

Or these studies should have eased the path to funding for more studies, vaccine development, and testing if we were governed by sentient beings with a modicum of decency, instead of parasitic radical fundamentalist half-wits who don’t give a flying rat’s whisker about the suffering of mothers and infants whatsoever, let alone the future of the human genome.