The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released new guidelines regarding the Zika virus.
CNN reported, “If you’re a man who travels to an area with active Zika transmission, you should wait at least six months after exposure to have unprotected sex or try to conceive a baby, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced, even if you never had symptoms of the virus. Women should wait a full eight weeks after exposure.”
The CNN article continued, “If you and your sexual partner have no plans for babies anytime soon, does that mean you’re off the hook? Not if you’re a good citizen. That’s because every person who brings the virus back into their country and gets bitten by an Aedes aegypti mosquito could be starting a local outbreak, which is what is happening now in Southeast Asia and in Florida in the United States. That’s why returning travelers from areas where the virus is circulating are advised to use mosquito repellant for the first three months they are home.”
The CDC created a map of Zika virus cases in the U.S. States such as Florida, Texas and California hold some of the highest numbers.
Source: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Socionomists have long warned of the negative health outcomes that attend periods of negative social mood. In the May and June 2009 inaugural issues of The Socionomist, Alan Hall explained that major epidemics of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries tended to occur near the conclusions of severe or extended declines in stock market indexes of heavily afflicted countries. Based on this research and his socionomic and Elliott wave analysis of the long-term social mood trend, he predicted an “increas[ed] risk of an encounter with one of the grim reapers of major social mood decline, epidemic disease.”
In the December 2015 Socionomist, Hall noted a multi-year decline in Brazil’s benchmark Bovespa Index and lamented that the country was “following that classic path: negative mood is fostering unsanitary conditions that produce health threats.”
And more recently, in the August 2016 Socionomist, Hall reported that we’re “still early in a season of susceptibility” and identified a number of territories at risk — such as Puerto Rico, Greece and Russia.
A February 2016 Lancet article said, “The early part of the 21st century has seen an unparalleled number of emerging infectious disease events … . So many in fact that perhaps we should no longer consider them extraordinary.” And a recent article in the Wall Street Journal reported, “Global epidemics are shifting from rare, historical events to be more like recurring dangers such as hurricanes or tornados.”
The infectious disease trend seems to be gaining momentum. Socionomics can offer you a powerful context in which to understand — and forecast — trends like these.