February 7, 2016

Michael Dennis, MD - Chairman

Schmidt College of Medicine

777 Glades Road

Boca Raton, FL 33431

RE: Zika  and how it threatens us as told by you in today’s unlinkable Sun Sentinel mini Op-Ed section

Dr. Dennis,

You tell us that the Zika virus can be spread through sexual contact. Further, the virus was first identified almost 70 years ago. The threat, particularly to pregnant women, cannot be overestimated. Maybe modern man should give some thought to zombies being real.

I don’t know about any potential cures being worked on but I do know an absolute fool proof, no chance of failure, way to prevent it. 

It is a self-evident fact that if you stop it from growing you can find a cure at your leisure.

Permit me an aside.

In 1963 I was a lay missionary in rural Mexico. Inter alia, I did construction work on an infirmary in Huejutla, taught English, coached volleyball and learned to love la cerveza Mexicana. I learned how to teach a hard lesson in market economics. I spent July 4^th in the bar where the fight scene from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” was filmed. A good summer for a 19 year old.

I also saw an infant die hard and horribly from malaria and it changed my life.

Its stomach was so distended that its sex to some time to discover. She was about 6 months old and her last recorded temperature was 106 degrees. Since that time I always try to keep a bottle of Schweppes tonic in my house as a tribute to the lasting power of old wives’ tales. 

I also know if DDT had been used that child would not have died.

I know that as many as 2,000,000 sub-Saharan children, with none of them being Caucasian, die each year because of rich White people – the original 1%ers? – wanted the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes from being on the moral high ground and neither knowing nor caring about the iron rule of unintended consequences.

The desire to save, maybe, the peregrine falcon overcame the revulsion of watching all those Black and Brown babies die. Do you think if Sharpton finds out we will have a Summer, not of Recovery, but rather of Rage? 

Not only did we ban the manufacture of DDT in this country we banned the export licenses necessary for it to be manufactured overseas. Such was our narcissistic environmental hubris that it permitted us to overcome a racially based genocide that stretched the envelope of perniciousness beyond recognition.

Put more succinctly, White people don’t care if Black people die from bug bites that need not have happened.  The flit that can stop the soon to be Zika plague has been locked up in a drawer in this country for 45 years. 

I am but one voice whose audience is limited. You have the academic credentials, the position, and more importantly, the audience to end this assault by pseudo-science on the fortress of reason. 

It’s a tough road to go down, what with the constant irrational conflation of causation and causation and the half-assed, half-baked claptrap that comes from the fans of nonsense such as Climate Change, drowning polar bears, and rising oceans.

Alas, we have allowed this generation’s understanding of the scientific method with its necessary inherent skepticism to be ruled by “Trousered Apes” who believe that consensus is what makes science. In an apparent refutation of the great Dr. Johnson, “Such stupidity is to be found in nature.”  

I suggest you clothe yourself in the armor given to you by Hippocrates and go forward to earn the trust society has given you.

“First, do no harm”

Kevin Smith