Zika by Donald G. McNeil Page A

emphasizing it—was jumped on by reporters and columnists and Twitter opinion leaders. Everyone wanted to prove he or she was too smart to believe the conventional wisdom. Every telephone press conference I listened to from Geneva or Atlanta had the same question over and over: “Do you really know that Zika causes microcephaly? What’s the evidence? Some people say it’s some sort of X—how do you answer them?”
    The frustrating thing about telephone press conferences is that everyone is usually allowed only one question, and it was an embarrassment to the profession how stupid some of those “Some people say it’s X” questions were. The best health reporters asked good ones, but everyone waiting in line got one brief turn, and then it was over. As each conference ended, I threw my headset off in frustration—which was easier on the office equipment than in the old days, when AT&T’s stout receivers could put some serious scars in the paint of the Times ’s gray Royal typewriters.
    Each of the rumors had some kernel of truth that made it credible. And, as each one was debunked, another would take its place. Top health officials were tearing their hair out; they were trying to explain the science and warn people to protect themselves, and instead they were constantly being asked to respond to new proofs that the world was flat. Worse, in the countries themselves, each rumor made people in the path of the virus more dismissive. If the government says, “This mosquito disease is dangerous!” but a guy in the barbershop says, “Oh, I heard the Brazilians just panicked—you know Brazilians” or “I heard it’s some American chemical in the drinking water—Monsanto, you know,” then the other customers skip buying window screens so as not to look like chumps.
    Something similar had happened during the 2014 Ebola epidemic: the initial outbreak was among the Kissi people in the interior where the borders of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone meet. But those three countries are run by elites in their capitals—in the cases of Sierra Leone and Liberia, by descendants of freed American and British slaves. They were dismissive of the “backwards Africans” in the interior, who distrusted them in return. So when word came down from the capitals that Ebola was a killer and people had to let their sick relatives be taken away by teams in space suits commanded by white foreigners and spraying bleach everywhere, and that they had to abandon deeply cherished and perfectly sensible customs like washing the blood and vomit off a body before a funeral or being able to lay a hand on a loved one to say goodbye, they rebelled. The rumor spread that it was all a plot by the elites to soak the Europeans and Americans for money. People hid their sick and held funerals clandestinely. One medical team was even hacked to death with machetes. The epidemic spread partly because it took months to get average people to take it seriously.
    This is sadly normal. Every new disease rides a wave of rumors. I had a long talk with Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan. “Rumors are the lifeblood of every epidemic,” he said.
    He cited a whole series of examples. The Black Death in the Middle Ages was blamed on the Jews, who were accused of poisoning Christian wells. AIDS was initially blamed on the “gay lifestyle,” including anal sex, intense disco dancing, and getting high on amyl nitrate poppers. His favorite was the rumor that spread during the 1892 cholera epidemic in New York City: it was the fish. Fishmongers’ sales plummeted, so the fishmongers lobby leaned on the Board of Health, whose president held a public fish dinner to dispel the rumors.
    But every rumor had some logic to it. Medieval cities had Jewish ghettoes, and plague sometimes struck there later. Not that the ghettos didn’t have rats, but no one