I'd forgotten about this too. I remember my sister being pregnant and worried about it.

It's still not clear why the outbreak spontaneously ceased and it hasn't resurged over the past decade.

Time-travelers are everywhere if you look.

Thanks, MC. I hadn't seen this and I do look periodically for Zika updates. My child with joint/connective tissue problems also has very mild microcephaly, meaning not enough that you look at them and think that anything's wrong so nowhere near this spectrum. Although I'm sure this article underplays the stresses and horrors, I love that the caregivers have managed to create a mutually supportive living space. Inspiring, but also exhausting!

It seems like it came back at one point but it wasn't a big enough surge to make making a vaccine worthwhile.

Thank you for the reminder, though.

Wasn't the big outbreak basically the first time it appeared in the Americas? Pretty normal to have a big epidemic when a disease first arrives and then for it to settle down longterm.

Thailand just had a big outbreak in 2023.

I have it in my head that Republicans used it as a cudgel in an election, but the timing doesn't really work out (and that's not Trump's specific kind of issue to whip up into a frenzy) so I must be confusing it with Ebola.

Yeah, you're thinking of Ebola in the 2014 midterms.

They sent the afflicted to Omaha, because it has better Italian restaurants than Lincoln.

Omaha may have also had a special hospital ward too.

That is an interesting article. Thanks! There definitely seems to be something weird about the epidemiology of Zika that isn't fully understood.

What's weird about it? For example, here's a paper from 2018 predicting that the epidemic would be largely over in Latin America in 2018.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s12916-018-1158-8.pdf

Not just the rapid rise and fall but the localization of impacts; the OP article mentions some of the possible factors so it's not like a huge mystery what might be causing it but it doesn't seem to be known.

The part about there maybe being bacteria in the water that led to increased susceptibility in certain areas is particularly interesting.

I suppose that it could be spread by sex or mosquito really triggered some of the lightly repressed fears of AIDS being spread by just being next to someone with HIV.

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Did you guys see Josh Marshall's respect of a memo leaking U Chicago's plans to shut down language departments? Notably, Classics and German. They mentioned employing ChatGPT to do language instruction or otherwise outsourcing it.

I know that the destruction of the University of Chicago is a basic tenet of Halfordismo, but this would not be the way to do it.

It could all be a fake, but it feels very similar to what's happening where I work - cheapening the product offered by a non-profit while trying to capitalize off of the brand - and the enthusiasm for AI is so bananas that part of me believes this.

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He was a man ahead of his time though.

I'll put this under grievance blogging.

Bostoniangirl: What I'm about to suggest isn't a solution for that growing problem, but still:

I was well and truly persuaded by Bret Devereaux's response to ChatGPT. I think it's this: https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/ and a quick skim convinces me that this is the same piece I read lo these many months ago (1.5yr). More generally, the -relevance- of Devereaux's work, and that of a number of other classical historians I've been reading lately, seems to argue that this entire approach of trying to discard classics is bound to end in tears for our society. And of course the same could be said for economic history (Brad Delong's work is a great proof of that) and other areas of history too: history of the Nazis, history of France's Republics, and on and on. I've been very impressed with Sarah C.M. Paine's work on grand strategy, focusing on the wars of the land empires of Asia (Russo-Japanese, Sino-Japanese, etc), and what it has to tell us about current military and world affairs.

I'm a computer scientist by training, and so reading works by historians doesn't come naturally to me. But I find reading history -essential- to understanding our moment, and ..... well, watching places like UChicago blow up the humanities is disappointing.