兹卡病毒肆虐之地 阴谋论谣言满天飞
SALVADOR, Brazil — The Zika virus, some Brazilians are convinced, is the inadvertent creation of a British biotech company that has been releasing genetically modified mosquitoes to combat dengue fever in Brazil. Others here and elsewhere see it as a plot by global elites to depopulate the Earth and install a “one-world government.”
巴西萨尔瓦多——一些巴西人确信，兹卡病毒是英国生物技术公司无意间制造的，该公司一直在巴西释放转基因蚊子，以对抗登革热。还有一些来自世界各地的人则认为，这是全球精英阶层旨在减少地球人口，建立一个“单一世界政府”的阴谋。
And after a group of Argentine doctors asserted that a larvicide, not the mosquito-borne Zika virus, was to blame for a surge in cases of the birth defect known as microcephaly, Brazil's southernmost state went so far over the weekend as to ban the use of the larvicide in its drinking water — even though scientists and health officials insist there is no such link.
而一些阿根廷医生声称，导致先天性小头症病例增加的是一种杀虫剂，而不是蚊媒传播的兹卡病毒，随后巴西最南端的州上周末甚至开始禁止对饮用水使用这种杀虫剂，尽管科学家及卫生官员坚称不存在这种关联。
Like Zika itself, rumors about it have replicated with viral ferocity through social media and word of mouth, frustrating the Brazilian authorities as they grapple with a poorly understood pathogen whose origins and implications are still something of a mystery.
相关传闻就像兹卡病毒本身，通过社交媒体和口口相传疯狂传播，令正在应对这种人类知之甚少的病原体的巴西当局十分苦恼，该病原体的源头及影响仍然是个迷。
With many of the rumors started and spread abroad, Brazil's Health Ministry has been scrambling to do damage control.
由于很多谣言都是在国外传开的，巴西卫生部正在紧急行动起来，防止影响扩大。
In a statement on Monday, the government noted that microcephaly, which causes brain damage, was also growing in communities that did not use the larvicide, pyriproxyfen, and declaRed bluntly, “The association between the use of pyriproxyfen and microcephaly has no scientific basis.”
在周一发表的声明中，政府指出那些没有使用杀虫剂、蚊蝇醚的社区，也在不断出现会引起脑损伤的小头症病例，并明确指出，“使用蚊蝇醚与小头症之间的关联没有科学依据。”
Graham B. White, a medical entomologist who is a consultant to the U.S. Defense Department on disease-carrying insects, called the Argentine doctors' assertion “ridiculous” and “not credible.”
医学昆虫学家、在带病昆虫问题上为美国国防部提供咨询的格雷厄姆·B·怀特(Graham B. White)称，阿根廷医生的说法是“荒谬”和“不可信”的。
White said that the larvicide did not work through the nervous system, the part of the developing fetus affected by microcephaly. He noted that it had been approved by the World Health Organization and had been widely used for years to treat drinking water in places where mosquitoes breed.
怀特表示，小头症会影响正在发育中的胎儿的神经系统，而这种杀虫剂不通过神经系统发挥作用。他指出，这种杀虫剂获得了世界卫生组织(World Health Organization)的认可，多年来广泛用于处理滋生蚊虫的饮用水。
None of which was mentioned in myriad posts on Facebook and Twitter, where the American actor Mark Ruffalo was among those sounding the alarm, with a post on Monday that was shared nearly 500 times.
Facebook和Twitter上的各种敲响警钟的帖子并没有提到这些信息，其中包括美国演员马克·鲁法洛(Mark Ruffalo)，他周一发布的帖子已被转发将近500次。
Though Brazil is at the center of an epidemic now affecting more than two dozen countries, many of the dubious claims about Zika are born abroad, their purveyors a well-known coterie of critics of genetically modified crops and creatures.
兹卡病毒已经蔓延至20多个国家，虽然巴西是疫情的爆发中心，很多有关兹卡病毒的可疑说法都源自国外，散布谣言的是那些众所周知的批评转基因作物和生物的机构。
With reputable-sounding names like The Ecologist and Global Research, they produce slick websites that weave facts, half-truths and pseudoscientific analysis into sinister assertions. They trace the hidden hand of “Big Pharma” spreading disease for profit and claim that billionaires like Bill Gates are closeted eugenicists seeking to address overpopulation by promoting poisoned childhood vaccines.
《生态学家》(The Ecologist)和全球研究(Global Research)等听起来有声望的机构纷纷创建漂亮的网站，将事实、半真半假的描述及伪科学分析编造成邪恶的断言。它们列举那些为盈利而传播疾病的“大制药公司”幕后黑手，并声称比尔·盖茨(Bill Gates)等亿万富翁私下里都是优生主义者，他们寻求通过推广有毒的儿童疫苗来解决人口过剩的问题。
Brazil, where mistrust of government is high, is fertile ground for such theories to gain traction.
巴西人民极不信任政府，为此类观点的继续传播提供了沃土。
Nailma Souza, 40, who owns a nail salon in Salvador, a city that has been hit hard by the outbreak, is certain that Zika was concocted to divert attention away from a cure for cancer that the authorities want to keep secret.
40岁的尼尔玛·苏扎(Nailma Souza)在萨尔瓦多开了一家美甲店，该市是兹卡疫情的重灾区。苏扎坚信兹卡病毒是一场阴谋，目的是转移对政府希望保密的癌症治疗方法的注意力。
“The Brazilian government wants to patent the drug to make money, but the investigators behind it want to give it away for free,” Souza said after showing a video, purportedly made by a Brazilian actress, pleading for the cancer drug to be released. “The government is involved in this, for sure. They always want to get our money.”
“巴西政府希望取得这种药物的专利权，以便盈利，但背后的调查人员希望免费发放药物，”苏扎说，在此之前她展示了一段据称由巴西女演员制作的请求发放抗癌药物的视频。“政府肯定参与了。他们总是想从我们身上捞钱。”
Claudio Maierovitch, the Brazilian Health Ministry's director of surveillance of communicable diseases, said there was a danger that fear and scant scientific information would lead people to ignore the government's exhortations about protecting themselves from mosquito bites and removing standing water that allows mosquitoes to breed.
巴西卫生部传染病监测部门主任克劳迪奥·梅罗韦奇(Claudio Maierovitch)表示，恐惧心理及科学信息的缺乏可能会导致人们无视政府的劝告，即防止蚊虫叮咬，清除滋生蚊虫的积水。
“Everything about Zika is new, and there is an aura of mystery about it, which leaves everyone open to new stories and new ideas about where it came from,” Maierovitch said. “The biggest risk is that people don't do enough preventive procedures because they don't believe Zika is dangerous or that the disease even exists.”
“有关兹卡病毒的一切都是前所未闻的，有一种神秘的气氛，导致大家可能听信有关其源头的新传闻、新想法，”梅罗韦赫说。“最大的危险在于，人们没有采取足够多的预防措施，因为他们认为兹卡并不危险，或者这种疾病根本不存在。”
Michel Misse, a sociologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said that rumors and conspiracy theories played an outsize role in Brazilian society, and that the spate of crises buffeting the Brazilian government made people question and doubt authority.
里约热内卢联邦大学(Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)社会学家米克尔·米塞(Michel Misse)表示，谣言和阴谋论在巴西社会中发挥了巨大作用，巴西政府接二连三遭遇危机，使得人们质疑、怀疑其权威性。
“Given the political moment we are living in,” he said, “a lot of people are not happy with our government, and it definitely plays a role when it comes to believing rumors that blame the government for things that are going wrong.”
“鉴于我们目前所处的政治时刻，”他说。“很多人对我们的政府感到不满，这在一定程度上促使他们相信一些谣言，认为是政府引发了一些不好的事情。”
Some Zika skeptics have been especially focused on a British company that began releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in Brazil in 2011 in an effort to stem a deadly outbreak of dengue fever. The company, Oxitec, inserts a modified gene into male mosquitoes so that when they mate with females in the wild, they will produce offspring that die before they reach adulthood.
一些对兹卡病毒持怀疑态度的人尤其关注2011年在巴西释放转基因蚊子的英国公司，该公司此举是为了阻止致命的登革热的疫情爆发。Oxitec公司将一种经过改造的基因植入雄性蚊子，使它们与雌性蚊子在野外交配繁衍出还没成年就会死亡的后代。
Discover magazine is among the authoritative sources that have disproved the allegation that the engineered mosquitoes are behind the Zika outbreak, born last month on a Reddit board devoted to conspiracy theories. Still, the dubious link has been picked up and expanded by scores of other outlets, including the anti-Western website Russia Today, the British tabloid The Daily Mail and conspiracy-minded websites like Natural News.
经过遗传工程处理的蚊子导致兹卡疫情爆发的说法，最初出现在Reddit的一个专门讨论阴谋论的版块，一些权威信源对此提出了驳斥，《发现》(Discover)杂志就是其中之一。但还有数十个机构在提出并传播这种令人怀疑的关联，比如反西方的今日俄罗斯(Russia Today)网站、英国小报《每日邮报》(The Daily Mail)及Natural News等推崇阴谋论的网站。
“It's fantasy,” Hadyn Parry, Oxitec's chief executive, said in an interview. “If children weren't involved and people weren't getting sick, it would be quite an amusing fantasy, but this is quite serious and irresponsible.”
“这是幻想，”Oxitec公司首席执行官哈迪恩·帕里(Hadyn Parry)接受采访时说。“如果没有涉及儿童，人们没有得病，那么这是一个相当逗乐的幻想，但就目前来说，这是十分严重和不负责任的。”
Brazilian health officials and scientists say the Oxitec program has reduced mosquito populations in affected areas by up to 90 percent, though its expansion is being held up by the government for technical reasons.
巴西卫生官员及科学家表示，Oxitec公司的项目将受感染区域的蚊子数量减少了90%，但出于技术原因，政府阻止了该项目的扩展。
“If politicians start pandering to those opposed to genetically modified mosquitoes without scientific basis to their arguments,” warned Tanjim Hossain, a research fellow at the University of Miami who specializes in mosquito control, “they are going to end up really hurting people.”
“如果政治人士开始迎合那些没有科学依据就反对转基因蚊子的人，”迈阿密大学(University of Miami)蚊虫控制研究员但吉姆·侯赛因(Tanjim Hossain)警告称，“他们最终会给人民带来严重的伤害。”
