© Mariana Bazo / Reuters
Specimens of Aedes aegypti mosquito
The World Health Organization will assemble an emergency committee to deal with what it says is a rapidly spreading Zika virus pandemic. However, scientists believe a vaccine is years away, while doctors say "questions abound" concerning the disease.
The UN-endorsed body says that
since the first cases were registered in Brazil in May of last year, as many as 1.5 million people have been affected by the virus in that country alone, while more than 20 other Central and South American states have registered native infections as well. The disease had previously only broken out in small pockets of Africa and Asia.
"Last year the disease was detected in the Americas, where it is spreading explosively," Margaret Chan, the WHO's director general, said at a hastily arranged press briefing in Geneva. "The level of concern is high, as is the level of uncertainty. Questions abound - we need to get some answers quickly. For all these reasons, I have decided to convene an Emergency Committee."
Most people with the disease, a mosquito-borne cousin of dengue and yellow fever, do not know they have been infected, or suffer mild flu-like symptoms. However, a notable minority appear to develop Guillain-Barre syndrome, a severe auto-immune condition, or give birth to children with microcephaly, a birth defect that results in an underdeveloped head and brain.
"A causal relationship between Zika virus and birth malformations and neurological syndromes has not yet been established - this is an important point - but it is strongly suspected. The possible links have rapidly changed the risk profile of Zika from a mild threat to one of alarming proportions," said Chan.
Before 2015, Brazil experienced fewer than 200 cases of microcephaly a year, but that figure has exploded to about 4,000 since the Zika outbreak, though officials say many can be attributed directly to other causes.
Comment: It's been said a number of times, but bears repeating: we became human BECAUSE we ate meat. It's the fuel that created our brains and our proper holistic integration into the natural order depends upon us eating meat. When looked at in an ecological sense, monocrop agriculture has been one of the most devastating forces on the planet. When looked at in a political sense, due to meat's role in brain function and proper health, the psychopaths that rule the world want to push the vegetarian agenda to keep people sick and dumbed down, to keep them as passive slaves. When looked at in a spiritual sense, eating meat is a sacrament that enables humanity to express the infinite creativity of divine nature though higher cognition and greater depths of empathy.
The biggest complicating factor in eating meat today is the existence of factory farms (CAFOs). Factory farms are, without a doubt, evil creations that profit off the needless suffering of animals. Many vegetarians and vegans, rightfully so, look at this suffering and are appalled. The propaganda machine then provides a reactionary solution: stop eating meat.
Yet factory farms have also been created through the influence of psychopaths and their conscienceless thinking on society and so, through the "problem reaction solution" manipulation and control tactic, the psychopaths entrap people with the horrifying factory farm system that they've created, then misdirect normal people into a thinking pattern and way of life that results in their eventual incapacitation and destruction. But there's another way.
The Paleo diet provides some of the best nutrition available for the body today, both in terms of necessary health-promoting nutrients and lack of toxins; people can then be healthy and think clearly, which could help get us as a species to get out of the mess we're in. Through better health, we could stop funding the corporations that are poisoning us with junk food, junk media, and junk medicine, and waging war on the world; we could recognize them for the parasites that they are. We could buy from local farmers rather than mega corporations and improve local economies rather than the psychopath-driven corporatocracy. The local farmers depend on the well-being of their animals and the land they live on, so they treat them with care and respect, unlike factory farms; the animals live well and holistically integrate into the natural system by doing the things that happy and healthy animals do (including building the soil on which all life depends) as do we. Forests could stop being destroyed for monocrop agriculture that doesn't serve our health and well-being, but only serves the psychopath's insatiable greed, need for destruction, and lust for power.
So economically, politically, nutritionally, and even spiritually, a more just, balanced, and holistic system can be created. And maybe, just maybe, such changes could help humanity begin to understand and recognize psychopaths as the intraspecies predators that they are, and DO something about it.
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