Zika may soon be coming to a home near you. The virus spreads through mosquito bites, blood, and sex. In the womb it laces rapidly through early brain cells of infants, destroying enough of them to create small heads, or microcephaly. In adults the virus can provoke Guillain-Barre disease, a horrible neurological condition where the white […]
Will Stopping Sex Stop Zika?
The End of Pregnancy Fear eats the soul and creates strange policies: witness how the Zika virus provokes national recommendations to stop pregnancy cold. If you are young and fertile and Salvadoran, the government wants you to shut down your reproductive capacity for two full years – you can think about having children in 2018. Colombia […]
Learning From The Next Ebola (10/20/14)
When the Past Is Prologue Humans don’t see threats until they’re kicking at the door. But that does not mean you can’t put a crisis to good use. Chance rules the world. As Nassim Taleb showed in “The Black Swan” and other books, low probability events can create high impacts. But the threat to the […]