Anxiety shrinkage

I think one of the reasons I'm so interested in neuroscience is because there is still so much to be explored.  In my Intro Neuroscience class, I frequently have to answer questions students ask with the frustrating statement "That's unknown at this time."  Even such simple things as how memories are stored and recalled are poorly understood, although we are making significant progress in finding out how they work.

My friend and mentor Rita Calvo, Professor Emeritus of Human Genetics at Cornell University, once told me that we are currently at the point in understanding the brain that we were in understanding genetics in 1915.  We have some knowledge of what's happening, a lot of descriptive information, and little in the way of comprehension of the underlying mechanisms.  I still recall her telling me that if she were a college student in biology now, she'd go into neuroscience.

"The 20th century was the century of the gene," she said.  "The 21st will be the century of the brain."

So any time there's an advance, I'm pretty keen on finding out about it.  Which is why the article my wife sent me yesterday was such an eye-opener.  Entitled "Neuroplasticity in Response to Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder," this study (published this week in Translational Psychiatry) has found that social anxiety might be due to a hyperactive part of the brain called the amygdala, which has been known to be involved in fear, anxiety, and the fight-or-flight response.  More interesting still, they found that cognitive behavioral therapy can literally cause this hyperactive bit to shrink.

K. N. T. Månsson of Linköping University in Sweden, who led the group that did the study, writes:

[W]e demonstrate interrelated structural plasticity and altered neural responsivity, within the amygdala, after CBT for social anxiety.  Both GM volume and neural responsivity in the bilateral amygdala diminished after effective treatment.  Left amygdala GM volume was positively associated with symptom severity before treatment, and amygdala volume decreased significantly with CBT, correlating positively with symptom improvement in both hemispheres...  [O]ur results reinforce the notion that structural neuroplasticity in the amygdala is an important target for psychosocial treatments of anxiety, as previously suggested for pharmacological treatments of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Did you get that?  Cognitive behavioral therapy -- essentially, a kind of talk therapy -- actually had an equivalent result to anti-anxiety medication, and caused the part of the brain that was hyperactive to become physically smaller.

Are you amazed as I was at this result?  Because I read this with my mouth hanging agape.  The idea that cognitive behavioral therapy actually has a measurable result in the form of an anatomical change is absolutely mind-blowing.

Pun (lame though it is) intended.

I have another reason to find this result fascinating.  I have suffered for years from serious social anxiety, starting when I was in my mid-twenties and becoming progressively worse for the following thirty years.  Those of you who read Skeptophilia but don't know me personally might have a hard time picturing someone who is as verbose as I am being a social-phobe, but you'll have to take my word for it; in most social situations, I get myself a glass of wine and then hope like hell that the hosts have a dog I can interact with.  I have gone entire evenings at friends' houses, listening politely, laughing at the right times, and not saying a word.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Last Judgment (1541) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I've also been in cognitive behavioral therapy for about a year to try and deal with some of this, with guardedly positive results.  I'm not expecting such a deep-seated and pervasive problem to go away quickly; Rome, as they say, wasn't built in a day.  But the idea that by participating in CBT I am not only working toward alleviating my anxiety, but am causing long-lasting anatomical alterations in my brain -- that is amazing.

Because I have to say that living with an anxiety disorder is not particularly enjoyable.  Anything I can do to shrink that overactive left amygdala is fine by me.

Changing the river's course

In talking to friends and family members, I've found that a common experience we have is in there being a small number of people who have radically altered our lives in a positive direction.  Sometimes a single gesture, smile, or well-placed word can shift our pathway profoundly, and the sad truth of it is that we seldom ever get around to telling those people how much they have changed us.

This comes up because a few days ago I found out that my high school French teacher, Shirley Taylor, died last summer.  I remember Mrs. Taylor well -- I had her class for four years running -- and she stands out in my memory as everything a teacher should be.  Firm but not harsh; high standards, and with a determination that every student can meet them; and a subtle and wry sense of humor.  But the one thing she did that I remember best is something she probably didn't even recall herself afterwards.

I was a fairly good French student but lackadaisical in most other classes, content to get by on a minimum of work, rarely pushing myself to do any better than I had to in order to stay out of trouble when I brought my report card home.  But Mrs. Taylor saw in me an ability to learn languages, and pushed me more than once to spend a year in France after I graduated.  I'd excel, she said, and I'd come back completely fluent.  It surprised me that she singled me out; like I said, I was no great shakes as a student.  The funny part of it all in retrospect is that I didn't take her advice about spending a year in France.  I didn't travel until much later -- to Mrs. Taylor's intense disappointment -- but when I first went to a non-English speaking country, years afterwards, I still remembered Mrs. Taylor's confidence in me.

"You're a natural," I recalled her saying.  "Someone like you needs to see the world."

I haven't stopped traveling since.

My French teacher, Mrs. Shirley Taylor (1936-2015)

The strangest thing about those moments is that we ourselves sometimes don't recognize them as the earthquakes they are while they're happening.  My entire life jumped to a different set of tracks when my high school counselor, Mr. Grace, grabbed my arm as I was walking down the hall in my senior year, and told me I needed to take a scholarship test that was being offered at the University of Louisiana.  I wasn't planning on going to college -- what I really wanted to do was to join the Park Service and move to Arizona -- but he said, and I quote, "You're taking that test if I have to go to your house on Saturday and drag your lazy ass out of bed."

So I did.  And I was one of the scholarship winners.  Automatic admission and full tuition to the University of Louisiana.  He turned my life a different way by that one action -- who knows where, or who, I would be now if it hadn't been for that one thing?

I remember with great fondness three other teachers who shaped my world -- Ms. Jane Miller, my high school biology teacher, whose passion for her subject and deep enthusiasm were absolutely contagious, and whose style I still model in my own classroom after nearly thirty years of being a teacher myself.  Dr. Harvey Pousson, my college calculus teacher, whose gentle, soft-spoken wit and brilliant way of explaining abstruse concepts made calculus one of my favorite subjects (and how many people do you hear that from?).  Ms. Beverly Authement, my high school creative writing teacher -- who I can say, without hesitation, turned me into the writer of fiction I am today, and without whose cheerful encouragement I would never have had the confidence to tell stories to the world.  (And who is, by the way, still a teacher today!)

I've been able to thank a few of these and other folks who have sculpted my life's path, and who have forever enriched my world.  Even though they may think they're forgotten -- that what they did was insignificant -- they remain the people whose influence has lasted.  And it makes me more determined not only to give gratitude to the ones whose lives so inspired my own, but to have more awareness myself about what I say and do.  Will anyone look back, forty years from now, and remember me as one of the pivotal connections in their lives?  And, most importantly, will that memory be a positive one?

I may never know the answer to that -- and that's okay.  Maybe the force that diverts the river doesn't recognize the effect it has, then or perhaps ever.  But it does highlight something I've known for a while: that we all need to be a great deal more cognizant of how we interact with the people around us, because we may be having a much larger effect than we will ever realize.

Political astrology

There is one word that makes me see red, skepticism-wise, and that word is "clickbait."

Clickbait articles, sensationalized bullshit that has as its only point inducing gullible people to click on links and therefore generate advertising revenue, are bad enough from an ethical standpoint.  But what really torques me about this sort of thing is the fact that many of the clickers end up believing what they read, regardless of the reliability of the source.  The strategy started with such dubious sites as The Weekly World News and Above Top Secret, but has moved its way into more mainstream media (The Daily Mail has adopted this approach to the extent that most of us refer to it as The Daily Fail).  And now, it has moved all the way up to the media source on which I found a clickbait article yesterday...

... none other than CNN.

The article in question, which required the collaboration of no less than three authors -- Pamela Boykoff, Alexandra Field, and Jason Kwok -- is entitled, "2016 Election: Which Candidate Will Triumph in the Year of the Monkey?"  And it is about -- yes -- using feng shui and Chinese astrology to predict who's going to win in November.

[image courtesy of photographer Jakub Hałun and the Wikimedia Commons]

The worst part about this is that it's not even in some kind of "Weird Stuff" category of CNN's webpage.  It's filed squarely under CNN Politics.  Let me be clear about this: this is not politics.  This is pseudoscientific nonsense.  Let me give you a taste of what's on it, so you don't have to click on the link and give them ad money yourself:

With the Year of the Monkey and the New Hampshire primary upon us, CNN asked Hong Kong fortune teller Priscilla Lam to divine the fates of the candidates battling it out for the U.S. presidency. 

A practitioner of feng shui, the ancient Chinese system of summoning good luck, she combined the art of face reading with analysis of the candidates' birthdays and current life cycles according to the Chinese Zodiac. 

She says the new lunar year will fuel good fortune for "earth dog" Donald Trump, while also lighting a fire under Hillary Clinton. 

Bernie Sanders' missing metal is a problem with older voters and the fighting elements of fire, and water might just leave Marco Rubio all wet.  And don't ask about Ted Cruz's face reading. 

Lam says she is "about 80%" confident in her predictions for the 2016 election. Those sound like pretty good odds.

So, yeah.  That's the level of political reporting we're seeing.  Trump's going to do well because he's an "earth dog."  Hillary Clinton's on fire.

And trust me, I don't even want to think about Ted Cruz's face, much less read it.

If we further peruse the article, we find out that Donald Trump has "a lot of sunshine in his favor."  that Hillary Clinton "has flexible lips," that Marco Rubio's "nose is okay -- it means management skill or power," and that Ted Cruz is in trouble because "in his birthday there is no wood... if you burn the wood, the fire can come up."

Whatever the fuck that means.

And the whole time I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, "how the hell is this news?"

The answer, of course, is that it isn't.  This is clickbait.  But the problem is, seeing such nonsense on a an internationally-known news media source gives it a veneer of authority, and reinforces the belief people have in such pseudoscientific claptrap.

So I'm really not able to laugh this sort of thing off.  I spend enough time, as a high school science teacher, trying to instill in students a good understanding of how the universe works, along with some skills regarding telling truth from falsehood.  Having something like this in mainstream media just makes my job that much harder, something I very much don't need.  Fighting the creationists and the climate-change deniers is bad enough; I really don't want to have to do battle with the Chinese astrologers as well.

GMO burrito attack

Many of you have undoubtedly heard about Chipotle's announcement last April that they were switching over to using entirely GMO-free ingredients.  The whole thing had us science types rolling our eyes, because it has been shown repeatedly that GMOs aren't dangerous in general (even though there have been rare specific cases that have had untoward effects, and those have been taken off the market).  Despite the evidence, the health-food cadre applauded Chipotle's move, saying that it was reassuring that at least one restaurant chain was doing the Right Thing.

Which is about all of the good news that Chipotle had in 2015, because beginning in the summer, they have had one problem after another with food-borne illnesses.  First, there was a norovirus outbreak in Seattle in July, followed by another in Simi Valley, California in August, sickening at least 240 people in the process.  August and September saw an outbreak of salmonella in Minnesota that sickened 64.  Another 52 contracted E. coli in October from restaurants in nine different states.  Then norovirus reappeared in Boston in December, causing nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea for 136 patrons.

The whole thing prompted the chain to announce a one-day closure in February 2016 to train staff on food safety, which seems a little after-the-fact but is better than nothing.  And the whole thing would have gone down as another example of dubious handling of a crisis by a corporation, if Mike Adams hadn't gotten involved.

Yes, Mike Adams, the "Health Ranger" and owner of Natural News, who spends much of his time sounding like a raving lunatic.  This time, he says, the bad guys have been caught red-handed.  The series of illnesses contracted by patrons of Chipotle aren't just an example of bad food handling and poor cleanliness standards; no, this is a deliberate attack by "food terrorists" to discredit the restaurant because of their fearless stand on GMOs.

I'm not making this up.  Here's a direct quote:

After observing recent events involving Chipotle and e.coli, here's my analysis of the situation: Chipotle's e.coli outbreaks are not random chance.  They are the result of the biotech industry unleashing bioterrorism attacks against the only fast food company that has publicly denounced GMOs. 

How do we know?  The CDC has already admitted that some of these e.coli outbreaks involve a "rare genetic strain" of e.coli not normally seen in foods.  Furthermore, we also know the track record of the biotech industry engaging in the most criminal, dirty, sleazebag tactics imaginable against any person or company that speaks out against GMOs.

So that's it?  No evidence?  Your "analysis" is based on the E. coli strain being "rare" and that the biotech industry is made up of a bunch of bad guys?  Oh, but wait... he says this same tactic has been used against another victim:

Doctor Oz, for example, was maliciously targeted in a defamation campaign funded by the biotech industry earlier this year.  The onslaught against Oz was initiated because he publicly expressed his support for honest GMO labeling on foods.

No, the investigation (hardly a "defamation campaign") was launched because Oz was giving health advice that was demonstrably false and selling supplements that were ineffective, not because he was against GMOs.  And using Dr. Oz, who still rakes in millions, as an example of a pitiful victim of an "onslaught" leaves me trying to find a word stronger than "disingenuous" and failing completely.

Adams doesn't mince words, however.  He spells it out plainly:

There is absolutely no question that the biotech industry will resort to ANY activity necessary to destroy food companies that oppose GMOs.  And yes, this includes acts of bioterrorism against Chipotle -- something that's ridiculously easy for biotech industry operatives to carry out with simple, low-cost laboratory supplies sold online at places like Amazon.com. 

To be clear, what's really happening at Chipotle is that biotech industry shills are deliberately contaminating Chipotle's food with strains of e.coli in a malicious attempt to destroy both the reputation and finances of the Chipotle food chain...  The idea that exposing the public to e.coli might be harmful to some people doesn't cause them to hesitate for even a moment.  The more people get sick or die from their Chipotle operation, the better for biotech!

What is funniest about all of this is that Chipotle is currently under investigation itself for selling food containing GMOs -- after they declared themselves GMO-free.  "We have always been clear that our soft drinks contained GMO ingredients, and that the animals from which our meat comes consume GMO feed.  But, that does not mean that our meat is GMO, any more than people would be genetically modified if they eat GMO foods," said Chris Arnold, Chipotle’s Communications Director.

So Chipotle is GMO-free in the sense of selling some food that is GMO-free and some that is not, and not being up front with its customers about which is which.  Got it.

And this is the company that the Evil Biotech Terrorists are targeting because they're too green?

[image courtesy of photographer Rosalee Yagihara and the Wikimedia Commons]

Let me reiterate: the vast majority of GMO foods are completely safe to consume.  Certain of them -- Bt corn comes to mind -- actually decrease the quantity of pesticides used by farmers, resulting in a healthier environment.  Others, like the GM papayas that are resistant to ringspot virus, have rescued an entire industry from bankruptcy (and it's to be hoped that the Evil Biotech guys will find a similar way to save bananas from the fungus Tropical Race 4, and oranges from the bacterial disease huanglongbing -- before two of our favorite fruits are a thing of the past).

The problem is, understanding the risks and benefits of genetic modification requires that you learn some science, and for a lot of people, it's easier to listen to people like Mike Adams rant about how the biotech industry is trying to DESTROY THE HUMAN RACE MWA HA HA HA HA HA.  It's not like we haven't had ample evidence that Adams's proclamations are nonsense; but unfortunately, in the media the usual case is that the guy who screams the loudest is the one who gets believed.

For what it's worth, here's my analysis, no screaming needed: there have been hundreds of norovirus, E. coli, and salmonella outbreaks in the past, and there's no need to invent bioterrorists to account for them.  Chipotle could certainly use some improvement in their food-handling standards, however, because five outbreaks in one year is kind of a lot.  Not to mention the fact that before they announce that they're GMO-free, they should make sure they're really GMO-free, for the benefit of people who care about such things.

And last: Mike Adams really needs to shut the hell up.

Laptops of the ancients

Every once in a while, I run into a crazy claim that is so weird that it's actually kind of charming.

That was my reaction to an article sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday, about a guy who thinks that there are images from Ancient Greece that show people using laptop computers.

Those images include this marble sculpture:

And this black-on-red ware vase:

In case that isn't sufficiently convincing, we're told that the sculpture even has cable connection ports:

Once again illustrating that you can't misinterpret it if I tell you what it is ahead of time.

The whole thing is the brainchild (to use the term loosely) of YouTube contributor StillSpeakingOut, who seems pretty convinced. "I can’t help but think," StillSpeakingOut tells us, "that Erich von Däniken had been right all this time and that most of these myths of magical artifacts given by the gods to a very restricted group of individuals in ancient civilizations were high-tech devices similar to what we have today...  I am not saying that this is depicting an ancient laptop computer, but when I look at the sculpture I can’t help but think about the Oracle of Delphi, which was supposed to allow the priests to connect with the gods to retrieve advanced information and various aspects."

No, labeling the diagram with a red arrow and the text "Laptop?" is definitely not saying that the sculpture depicts a laptop, presumably by virtue of adding the question mark.

Of course, those silly old rationalist historians have been quick to squelch the whole idea of the Ancient Greeks inventing wifi.  The "laptop" depicted in both pieces, they say, is actually one of the following:

• a wax tablet, used for writing
• a jewelry box
• a mirror

But I think we can all agree that when it comes to speculating over the identity of an object in a piece of ancient art, one should definitely choose the answer that requires you to believe that the ancients had a piece of technology that they didn't, in fact, have.

Because if you think the Ancient Greeks had laptops, it kind of brings up a few questions, you know?  Like why haven't we found any traces of them in archaeological dig sites?  Where are depictions of all of the other things that you'd need to make a laptop go, like modems, routers, cables, and a mechanism for producing electricity?

And most damning of all, if the Greeks had computers, why is there no mention in their literature of people spending their free time sending each other comical pictures of cats and poorly-spelled memes suggesting that people of the opposite political party are brainless, spineless, heartless, soulless, and depraved?

When you think about it, all you have in both pieces of art are objects made of two flat things hinged together, and it's not like laptops are the only possibility for that configuration.

So I'm not buying it.  And I'm especially not impressed that as support, StillSpeakingOut brought up Erich von Däniken, who kind of sucks as an expert witness, given that he thinks that Odin, Thor, Loki et al. were aliens from another planet.  Sad to say, but the prosaic answer is almost certainly right, and the folks depicted in the art work were almost certainly not checking their Biblos-prosópou, which is as close as I can get to the Ancient Greek equivalent of "Facebook."

Puritans in charge

H. L. Mencken once quipped that "Puritanism [is] the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."  We always associate Puritanism with the 17th century, with funny hats with buckles and dark clothing and women in modest dresses -- and the torture and execution of witches.  In other words, as a thing of the past.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

However, there is a deep streak of Puritanism in our culture still.  The simultaneous obsession with and revulsion over sex in the United States is peculiar, to say the least.  You can't go to a mall without being accosted by images of nearly naked models of both genders in places like Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch.  Movies and television are full of references to sex, both oblique and overt.  And yet a lot of the time, we alternately act as if sex is shameful or depraved, or as if it simply doesn't exist.

And in no realm does our split attitude show as clearly as in how we educate children about their own bodies.  Any time someone proposes frank, realistic sex education in schools, parents have a meltdown about the erosion of morality in the United States.  As if their children won't become sexually active unless they find out about it in class.  As if there weren't an inverse correlation between teen birth rates and the degree to which birth control, HIV prevention, and general sex education is addressed in the schools.  As if abstinence-only education programs haven't been shown over and over to be completely ineffective at reducing teen pregnancy and the incidence of STDs.

Ignore it and it won't happen, seems to be the usual approach.

Of course, when simply ignoring sex doesn't work, the modern-day Puritans choose instead to go on the offense.  Witness the recent push by lawmakers in Kansas to prosecute teachers who "expose students to material of a sexual nature."

We're not talking about pornography here.  The whole thing got started by Representative Mary Pilcher-Cook, who flipped her frilly white bonnet when she found out that there was a poster displayed in Shawnee Mission High School that had the question, "How do people express their sexual feelings?" and listed "oral sex" as one possibility.  Pilcher-Cook said, in a quote that I am not making up, "Children could have been irreparably harmed by viewing this poster... because it affects their brains."

"State laws should protect parents’ rights to safeguard our children against harmful materials, especially in schools," Pilcher-Cook went on to say.  "The fact that the poster was posted without fear is a problem in and of itself."

Phillip Cosby, head of the American Family Association of Kansas and Missouri, was quick to jump to her defense.  With respect to children finding out about sex, he said, "It’s a tsunami.  And maybe we’re the Dutch boy who’s just putting their finger in the dam."  He went on to say that he can't even watch a Kansas City Royals game with his grandchildren without their seeing a commercial for erectile dysfunction.

So how is that a problem, Mr. Cosby?  When my sons were young, I can see the conversation going this way:

Television commercial:  "See your doctor if you think this medication might help your erectile dysfunction." 

My kid:  "Dad, what's 'erectile dysfunction?'" 

Me:  It's a problem some older guys get, where the penis doesn't work as it should.  There's a medication that can help." 

My kid:  "Oh.  Okay.  When's the baseball game going to be back on?"

Yup.  They'd clearly have been scarred for life.

It isn't that I'm not cognizant of the importance of a child's age with regards to what sort of material they're exposed to.  With sexuality, as with most things, there is a point where children become capable of understanding, and it's not a good idea to push ideas on kids for which they're not emotionally ready.  But we seem to have no particular problem with trusting educators to make those judgments in other realms, do we?

No one is assigning Macbeth to nine-year-olds, for example.

But there's something different about sex, apparently, that makes it taboo at any age.  Instead of being honest with our children about their own bodies, we're teaching them that their feelings and desires are inherently shameful.

I still remember a couple of years ago in my neuroscience class, when we were talking about neurotransmitters.  I brought up endorphin, which is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasurable feelings of all sorts, and I mentioned that endorphin is released in the brain during orgasm.

One student looked a little taken aback.  I asked him what was up.  He said, blushing scarlet, "I've never heard a teacher use that word before."

This kid, by the way, was in 11th grade.

Why shouldn't we be honest with kids about their bodies as a source of pleasure and as a way to connect with their partners, and not just as a tool for reproduction?  When we take a step past the focus on men and women as baby-making machines, it's usually only to warn students about the risks.  Only rarely do we make any effort to give teenagers a well-rounded view of sexuality.  How do we expect young people to approach sex in a respectful and responsible fashion when we won't even bring up the topic?  And considering the fact that teenagers are usually hyper-focused on sex anyhow, isn't it better to discuss it openly rather than pretend that if we ignore it, it'll go away?

But the undercurrent of Puritanism that still exists in the United States makes it unlikely that such an approach will be realized any time soon.  If we're still at the point when a state legislator wants to have criminal charges levied against a teacher for mentioning oral sex, we have a very long way to go.

Zika freakout

Can we once, just once, face a problem in the world and find a solution based in logic?  And, fer cryin' in the sink, not ascribe it to a conspiracy?

I am referring, of course, to the Zika virus, which is currently exploding in the tropics, and is suspected of being connected to microcephaly and low brain development in infants born to infected women, and also cases of the neurological disease Guillain-Barré syndrome.  (Nota bene: these connections are still tentative, and are being studied.  The evidence thus far indicates possible links, but establishing causation and finding an underlying mechanism in either case have yet to be accomplished.)

Of course, a viral disease carried by mosquitoes, with uncertain and possibly devastating consequences for the victims through an unknown mechanism, opens the door for wild speculation.  And the conspiracy-minded amongst us have certainly been quick to rise to the occasion.

First, we have the claim that Zika was caused by the release of genetically-modified mosquitoes by Oxitec Inc., a biotechnology firm -- in some versions of the story, caused deliberately for the purposes of population control.  And since no conspiracy is complete without a powerful rich guy controlling the whole thing, the originator of this evil master plan is...

... none other than Bill Gates.

So, the idea is that under Gates's funding and direction, Oxitec genetically engineered the virus, then genetically engineered mosquitoes to carry it, and released them in Brazil.  Since then, they (and the virus) have been spreading north rapidly.

My question is: why would Bill Gates do this, given that if the population of the Earth crashes, there will be far fewer people around to purchase updates to Windows every six weeks?  He doesn't really seem to have a lot to gain by spawning a pandemic.  And as for the conspiracy theorists, they're not really clear about this.  The upshot is, "Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, that's why."

Aedes aegypti [image courtesy of the Center for Disease Control and the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem, of course, is that the whole claim is based in a bunch of falsehoods.  As Christie Wilcox points out in her wonderful blog Science Sushi, Zika is nothing new; it was first isolated and described in 1947 from mosquitoes collected in the Zika Forest of Uganda.  Thus the name.  It spread across Africa by 1968, made a jump to Micronesia in 2007, to Polynesia in 2013, and was first spotted in the Americas -- in Chile, not Brazil -- in 2014.  The genetically modified mosquitoes were developed to combat mosquito outbreaks, not foster them; the GM mosquitoes contain a "kill switch," a set of genes that allows them to mate but results in non-viable offspring.  And because the species of mosquito that carries Zika -- Aedes aegypti -- also carries dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever, and malaria, it's hard to imagine how this could be a bad thing, especially considering that the other option is the use of highly toxic pesticides.

But the conspiracy silliness doesn't end there.  Jon Rappoport, whose dubiously sane pronouncements have been featured in Skeptophilia before, has come up with something even goofier.  In his blog post "Zika Hoax: Five Things That Will Happen Next," we hear that there is no connection between Zika and microcephaly (which, of course, could turn out to be true; as I mentioned earlier, scientists are still investigating the point).  Then, however, he runs right off the cliff, predicting that researchers will develop a vaccine for Zika, but that the vaccine and the virus will turn out to be "weaponized biowar [agents]."

Because if you've launched a biological warfare virus, the first thing you'd do is to come up with a vaccine that's also for biological warfare.  And somehow, Zika is both a hoax and an evil biological weapon at the same time.

How evil can you get?  Cf. "Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha."

Of course, the major problem with all of this foolishness is that the basis of the conspiracy is that the release of the GM mosquitoes coincides, both in time and place, with the outbreak.  And this turns out to be false.  As Wilcox writes:

The epicenter of the outbreak and the release clearly don’t line up—the epicenter is on the coast rather than inland where the map points. Furthermore, the first confirmed cases weren’t reported in that area, but in the town of Camaçari, Bahia, which is—unsurprisingly—on the coast and several hundred kilometers from the release site indicated. 

But perhaps more importantly, the location on the map isn’t where the mosquitoes were released. That map points to Juazeiro de Norte, Ceará, which is a solid 300 km away from Juazeiro, Bahia—the actual site of the mosquito trial. That location is even more on the edge of the Zika-affected area.

On the other hand, think about it; it makes sense that they'd release the GM mosquitoes near where the outbreaks occurred.  Since the whole idea is to control Zika in Brazil, it wouldn't make much sense to release the mosquitoes in, say, Greenland.

But that sort of logic never seems to appeal as much as fact-free and panic-stricken shouting, for some reason.

In any case, bottom line: Zika isn't genetically engineered, isn't new, and isn't being spread by GM super-mosquitoes because of some obscure plot by Bill Gates.  I'd be much obliged if people would stop spreading this nonsense around, because it's got to be annoying to the scientists who are working on the real problem that Zika represents.  Thank you.