if the great detective could have investigated this amazing disappearance, no Zika-microcephaly these last six years, what would he have found? It has been more than six years since the WHO’s declaration of a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”, a.k.a. the Zika-microcephaly Pandemic. As the Grateful Dead note, “What a long strange trip it’s been!”: from predictions of 1 million microcephaly births globally perennially(!) to… well, absolutely nothing at all! Of course, with loads of panic in between: the fear of a single mosquito-bite’s turning a billion women’s lives upside down and almost literally outside in (avoiding mosquitoes in the tropics is not easy!).
In the meanwhile, our lovely planet has suffered through an entirely different pandemic — of course, one much larger in scope –that has eclipsed 2015-2016’s Zika phenomenon. It’s easy then to forget Zika was “big news”; one of the top five news stories of 2016. Oddly then — as mysteriously as Zika-microcephaly arrived on the medical/science scene, so too it disappeared; albeit with much less fanfare and news coverage.
My inner “Sherlock Holmes” was enticed by the Zika-microcephaly story back in 2016, and revived in the succeeding years when my own predictions of its unlikelihood seemed to be confirmed. I am merely a long-term solo practice GP whose independence ironically may prove advantageous in figuring out “what happened?” Those solidly within the research-grant funding circuit seem either unable or unwilling to see “The (Zika-) Emperor’s New Clothes” for what they are: insubstantial by virtue of never having thoroughly been put together in the first place. A few individual physicians’ conjectures became (in the panic) “too big to be examined closely”, having circumvented the scientific method’s vetting via leaks to a sensationalism-hungry media.
The Zika-microcephaly phenomenon consists of three separate legs of a chair, all of which have to be completely solid and well-formed for the entirety to stand.
- Mild dengue cases constituted some new and different illness. Dengue’s biologic twin, Zika, which had never been a human illness and for which there was no testing available in Brazil at the time was that new illness.
- Recife neuropediatricians’ unofficial counts and feelings there was more microcephaly were fact, even without corroborating comparison data on hand– let alone without a consistent metric for measurement and diagnosis of the syndrome.
- Microcephaly, overall very rare, and with multiple causes, none of which seem specific, and almost all of which track with poverty necessarily had to have a new cause for this unverified increase in cases, and that new cause was to be Zika, whose twin dengue had never caused any such syndrome despite millions of Brazilian cases.
None of these three seemed scientifically solid, even at the time. There had been a fair amount of skepticism and counter-argument to each of the three separate novel formulations, but these were no match for the whirlwind new cycle.
Every succeeding year without Zika-microcephaly recurrence further nails its pseudoscience coffin more solidly shut. Nearly a billion women of reproductive age currently face pregnancy somewhat on pins and needles anticipating that a single mosquito bite can irrevocably damage the cherished life within. Imagine the guilt when a coincident but unrelated microcephalic birth occurs. Women throughout Latin America were told to put their lives, their families, their reproductive possibilities on hold — until a vaccine could be produced. Six years and counting, nothing – although there is one out for its near twin, dengue as of 2019-2020. These young families deserve closure.
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