Happy to be Wrong!

Mr. Predictor* Predicts Biblical Plague

In May, 2016, I put on my Worst Case hat, slipped on my magic Prediction Ring, and in stentorian tones pronounced:
Zika = Abortion Explosion!
What's a "Pro-Lifer" to do?

"Aedes aegypti" feeding on a human, Photo Courtesy: CDC Public Image Library, Taken by J. Gathany
[Then I politicized shamelessly]
Thanks in part to slow thinking House Republicans, the zika virus is about to invade the U.S. South and bring  a plague of Biblical proportions.

Every pregnant woman's baby-to-be will be threatened with horrible birth defects, life destroying defects.

Without massive intervention, a whole generation of children and their families will be deeply scarred. Microcephaly is but the most obvious, and there are more and more discoveries of tragic impacts of this mosquito-borne disease.
[I blathered on.  I called this prediction just at the Zika peak in south and central America.]

Then..... In my copy of Science Magazine, arriving today (mine comes late)...

Zika has all but disappeared in the Americas. 

By Jon Cohen


Saved by The Herd!

Nobody knows for sure what's happened.  It's not the huge effort to control the aegypti and albopictus mosquitoes, but it surely helped. My fave of the possibilities is that more and more infected people showed no symptoms but developed immunity until the "herd" effect - not enough infected people for the human-to-mosquito-to-human odds to work, came to pass. Lo. Whatever is was, it should last at least ten years. 
[Ah... If they don't know what happened, how can they predict.... never mind.]
Read the article here.

I am so very, very glad to have been wrong. Sorry for the alarmism, but I was, you know, alarmed.



*Me, wrong for once.



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