Today in Zika Hyperbole

In the aftermath of one of the more appalling weeks in our nation's history, Slate's lead headlines for July 9, 2016 include a news item about Zika to provide a further dollop of anxiety and dread. The headline notes that someone has actually died of Zika--right here, in the United States!--and then asks the question: now should we panic?

The answer is "no," but what's amazing about this is that the article itself makes clear the degree to which the headline is overblown. "The individual was elderly and 'had an underlying health condition,'" author Matt Miller notes in quoting a press release from the Utah Department of Public Health. Citing WHO statistics, Miller later reveals that the total number of Zika infections in 2015 was estimated to be between 400,000 and 1.3 million people, of which three can be supposed to have died from the virus (and five infants born with microcephaly--yes, that number is five, not five million, or even five thousand). "Zika is still a situation that warrants better public health communication, more extensive research, and certainly more funding. But this death is no reason to panic," the article concludes.

If that is so, then why run the article at all, unless the headline was to suggest precisely the opposite of what it did say?

--Billy