The Zika virus is now hitting the American airways just like HIV did in 1981. They both have been in medical journals for years but there had not been an outbreak.

My jaw dropped when I first heard of Zika on the news a few weeks ago and they showed victims of the virus. A question that I’d had since the early 1980’s was finally answered.

A film that I watched in my early 30’s was “Freaks”. It’s an old black & white film made in 1932. (I love b&w movies!). The premise of the movie is that it takes place in a circus that is famous for its human freaks. The movie became famous because it cast REAL human freaks. Without going into detail I’ll just say, the scene where the legless, armless man is slithering in the mud with a knife clenched in his teeth left me wondering what he was going to do with it.

Three of the “freaks” fascinated me.  They were referred to as “pinheads” and were named Pip, Zip and Half Boy. I had never seen anyone with the receding foreheads like these three had. That is until I saw the Zika victims. This virus is creating a new group of special needs that we will need to address.

When one of these outbreaks of obsolete diseases/viruses occurs I wonder what triggered it. Global warming? Act of God? Why do they just pop up, almost out of nowhere? I know a major factor in spreading infections is the mobility of society…but what triggers the original case?

Zika is going to be a pretty big threat. When I heard a pregnant woman tell a newscaster that she wasn’t going to her sister’s wedding in Jamaica because of the Zika outbreak there, I thought “Your relatives will bring it home to you”. If anyone attending the wedding is bitten by a virus carrying-mosquito they now carry the virus. Imagine that the family gets together back home and the carrier is bitten by a mosquito who then moves to the pregnant woman and proceeds to bite (infect) her. Yikes!!

The people “in the know” have said that in addition to mosquito bites,it now can be contracted by saliva, blood and sexual contact. My biggest concern is,  we can control how we share bodily fluids, but how do we control those pesky insects…without killing the butterflies?