As the mother of a child with Down syndrome, I recall learning that very few agents are confirmed to cause birth defects. That made me interested when Zika was cited as the cause of microcephaly. (As did the fact that I met an anencephalic baby once and the doctors didn’t know what caused it. They encouraged the parents to have more children and the next child, tragically, was also born anencephalic.) Then, when I noticed that many of the pictures I saw in the news reports of the “thousands” of cases of Brazilian microcephaly were actually of the same baby (“Daniel”), I started to dig into the Zika virus scare. As I dug in, I discovered that the 4,000 cases were more like 400 cases and only 17 were found to be even potentially related to Zika. I further discovered that 25,000 cases of microcephaly occur in the US annually where there are no reported cases of a Zika relationship. Just comparing the relative population sizes of Brazil and the US, by this measure, Brazil should have 14,000 cases of microcephaly even without Zika, yet it has nowhere near that number.
I started to wonder what the agenda might be of panicking people unjustly over Zika-related birth defects when I saw this: Obama asks for $1.8 billion in emergency Zika funding. Given that there has been maybe one case of Zika in the US (despite the CDC assigning Zika Level 1 status–a status only issued by the CDC thrice before, for Katrina, ebola & swine flu), I found this curious. What would the money be used for?