EA - Stop Thinking about FTX. Think About Getting Zika Instead. by jeberts

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Stop Thinking about FTX. Think About Getting Zika Instead., published by jeberts on November 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.(Or about getting malaria, or hepatitis C (see below), or another exciting disease in an artisanal, curated list of trials in the UK, Canada, and US by 1Day Sooner.)Hi! My name is Jake. I got dysentery as part of a human challenge trial for a vaccine against Shigella, a group of bacteria that are the primary cause of dysentery globally. I quite literally shtposted through it on Twitter and earned fifteen minutes of Internet fame.I now work for 1Day Sooner, which was founded as an advocacy group in early 2020 for Covid-19 human challenge trials. (Who knew dysentery could lead to a career change?) 1Day is also involved in a range of other things, including pandemic preparedness policy and getting hepatitis C challenge trials off the ground.What I want to focus on right now is Zika. Specifically, I want to convince people assigned female at birth aged 18-40 in the DC-Baltimore/DMV area reading this post to take a few minutes to consider signing up for screening for the first-ever human challenge trial for Zika virus (ZIKV) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.Even if you fall outside that category, I figure this might be something interesting to ponder over, and probably less stressful than the cryptocurrency debacle that shall not be named.1Day Sooner is not compensated in any way by the study/Hopkins for this, nor do I/we represent the study in any official sense. I happen to have become very fascinated by this one in particular because it represents how challenge trials can be used for pandemic prevention with comparatively few resources. This post is meant to inform you of the study with a bit more detail from an EA perspective, but does not supplant information provided by the study staff.(If you’re a DMV male like me bummed you can’t take part, ask me about current or upcoming malaria vaccine and monoclonal antibody trials taking place at the University of Maryland — I'll be screening next week! If you’re not in the DMV or otherwise just can’t do anything for Zika or malaria, you can still sign up for our volunteer base and newsletter, which will help you keep tabs on future studies. Something we’re very excited about is the emerging push for hepatitis C challenge studies, see the link above.)Zika 101Zika is a mainly mosquito-borne disease that has been known since 1947 — The 2015-2016 western hemisphere epidemic showed that Zika could cause grave birth defects (congenital Zika syndrome, CZS) — The disease is very mild in adults at presentThe Zika virus (ZIKV) was discovered in the Zika forest of Uganda in 1947, and a few years later, we learned it could cause what was universally assumed to be extremely mild disease in humans. The 2015-16 Zika epidemic that started in South America, and which was particularly severe in Brazil, proved otherwise. This is when it became clear that Zika was linked to horrific birth defects. Zika has since earned its place on the WHO priority pathogen list.To briefly review the basics of Zika:The Zika virus is a flavivirus, in the same family as dengue fever, yellow fever, and Chikungunya, among others. Flaviviruses are RNA viruses, which generally lack genomic proofreading ability and are thus more prone to mutation.Zika infection sometimes causes Zika fever, though asymptomatic cases are very common. Zika fever is usually very, very mild, and direct deaths are extremely rare.Zika is much more of a concern if you are pregnant — in about 7% of infections during pregnancy, the virus infects a fetus and causes serious, even fatal, birth defects. These defects, which most frequently include microcephaly, are referred to as congenital Zika syndrome (CZS).Zika is also thought to increase t...