Health authorities in the Central American nation of El Salvador, with its predominantly Catholic population, have warned women to avoid pregnancy until 2018 due to the risk of microcephaly in babies born to mothers bitten by Zika-carrying mosquitoes during gestation. Health authorities in the Caribbean from the island of Dominica to the Dominican Republic, also a predominantly Catholic country, have instituted special measures, promising to check up even on pregnant women who don't show symptoms.
The Zika virus represents for Catholic countries in Latin America an existential threat, as it has already spread to 20 states in the region: Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, French
Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique,
Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico [US territory,] Saint Martin, Suriname, and
Venezuela.
In a region where Pope Francis, the predominant religious leader, has preached against contraception -- despite his liberal reputation -- Zika promises to be spread not just by mosquitoes; according to reports, "there has been one report of possible
spread through blood transfusion and one of possible spread through sex." This means that even if a woman were to take special precautions to avoid mosquito bites, she may become infected through sex with her partner.
Pernambuco, a Brazilian state with 129,000 yearly births, where traditionally only nine babies a year are born with microcephaly, reported over 650 cases of the debilitating brain condition in 2015. It is unclear for how long men who have been bitten by Zika-carrying mosquitoes remain infectious, or if the side-effects from the virus are solely restricted to the first pregnancy. There is little need to stress the gravity of the situation: countless babies risk being born with a debilitating, life-long handicap, and the birth rate in many countries promises to plummet below population replenishment levels.
Given the severity and scope of the crisis, it's only natural that conspiracy theories begin to spread surrounding the nature of the Zika virus and its dispersal throughout the Americas. The Absolute Vanguard in Brazil reported in December that the British biotech firm, Oxitec [funded by Bill Gates] released genetically-modified mosquitoes, to the tune of nearly 7 million a week, after breeding them for dependence on tetracycline, a compound described by Oxitec as an "antidote" that inactivates the "self-limiting" gene OX513A.
According to the Vanguard, the transgenic mosquitoes were exposed to tetracycline in the wild, or have managed to reproduce despite the lethal gene insertion. Many suspect that this development has allowed the Aedes aegypti mosquito to disperse viruses in unpredictable ways, or to aggravate the severity of viruses already previously borne by the insect in faraway parts of the world.
Biological warfare? |
If any of this is news to you, or if you think that no one could have predicted this disaster, let's step back to February of 2014, when Abreu Report published an article -- Mosquito Mutation Threatens Stability of Global Civilization -- wherein we reported:
"Brazil's genetically-modified mosquitoes will not eradicate dengue, they
will only lower the number of viable offspring in a given year. As Jeff
Goldblum so eloquently put it in Jurassic Park, 'Life breaks
free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers,
painfully, maybe even dangerously... nature finds a way.'"
"In Tanzania and Kenya, mosquitoes have adapted to mosquito nets, proving
that 'nature finds a way.' If mosquitoes can adapt to nets, even a
successful program that lowers the number of mosquitoes carrying
diseases could in the future lead to a 'surge through a population of
humans without the cultural knowledge or
pharmaceuticals necessary to defend themselves against it.'"
Less than two years after our article, nature has found a way, and now more than 20 countries teeter on the precipice of an abyss, with the entire stability of Latin America at risk. The US Centers for Disease Control [CDC] has issued a travel warning for pregnant women, recommending against visiting large swaths of the region, a move which threatens the fragile economy of some of the most impoverished countries in the world.
Healthy Mosquitoes |
Perhaps after realizing what a Pandora's box they had opened, federal authorities in Brazil suspended the transgenic mosquito release-plan this past November. Oxitec managed to sell the Brazilian government the lie that tetracycline wasn't available in the environment, and that mosquitoes with the OX513A gene insertion would be unable to reproduce. Yet, tetracycline is widely used in clinical, veterinary, and agricultural settings, leading to rampantly dangerous antibiotic resistance in plasmids, with studies from as far back as 2001 showing that:
"The gram-negative efflux genes are
widely distributed and normally associated with large plasmids, most of
which are conjugative. They come from a number of different plasmid
incompatibility groups (115, 176).
These plasmids often carry other antibiotic resistance genes, heavy
metal resistance genes, and/or pathogenic factors such as toxins (70).
Thus, selection for any of these factors selects for the plasmid. This
phenomenon of cross-selection has contributed to the dramatic increase
in the number of multiple-drug-resistant bacteria over the last 40 years (146, 226)."
This essentially means that Oxitec mosquitoes lucky enough to find a farm where tetracycline was being used were likely also feeding on animals exhibiting tetracycline-related antibiotic resistance, leading to compromised immune systems. What has essentially been created in this whole diabolical web is a system where transgenic mosquitoes may pass a virus on to a farm animal, such as a pig exhibiting Reston Ebola, creating a recombinant virus that wreaks havoc on the entire planet.
In an October, 2014 article -- Viral Recombination on the Verge of Rupturing Gates of Hell -- Abreu Report wrote: "At this point, nature is playing genetic Russian roulette, with each
spin of the cylinder potentially firing a bullet with enough power to
cause a mass-extinction level event that could end life as we know it."
A mass wave of microcephaly is just the beginning of the ensuing mosquito calamity which threatens to depopulate large sections of the world. We may have potentially unleashed our own destruction.
A mass wave of microcephaly is just the beginning of the ensuing mosquito calamity which threatens to depopulate large sections of the world. We may have potentially unleashed our own destruction.