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Friday, December 9, 2016

Zika fears not changing South Floridians' sex habits

2:00 PM Bilal Muazin No comments

You delay having kids. You take a cold shower for months after you've traveled to Brazil. Or you use condoms, even if you're already pregnant.

Such is life with Zika, if you play by the rules.

Safe sex practices have been part of the official Zika prevention guidelines since early this year, when researchers confirmed the virus that can cause severe birth defects could be transmitted by sexual contact as well as mosquito bites.

The current federal Centers for Disease Control precautions advise anywhere from eight weeks up to six months of abstinence or condom use, depending on where you live, where you travel, and if you are pregnant or want to be. While expectant couples are the main target, the guidelines apply to anyone who doesn't want to get Zika.

So are people actually going to live like this?

Some public health experts are doubtful.

"I have talked with quite a few physicians, as well as sexually active patients. And I have not encountered anyone who has changed their sexual behavior. It's the hardest thing in the world is to get people to do," said Dr. Sonjia Kenya, an HIV researcher and sexologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

What's the problem? Kenya thinks, in part, the consequences of Zika just aren't scary enough, unless you are a pregnant woman worried about becoming infected.

Most everyone else "has become pretty immune to the Zika media hype," said Kenya, author of "Sex in South Beach," who has been called a multicultural Dr. Ruth. "There is something about the sun and the beach and alcohol that invites people to be more relaxed."

The Sunshine State already is a hotbed for sexually transmitted disease -- and yes, the CDC considers Zika an STD, like gonorrhea and syphillis and HIV.

The CDC's annual HIV Surveillance Report, released this week , found the rate of new infections in South Florida's cities over the past year shot up more than three times the national average.

"If getting HIV doesn't scare you into changing your behavior, I don't think Zika will," Kenya said.

True, being bitten by a Zika-infected mosquito remains by far the most common way humans get the virus. As of Dec. 7, the CDC has confirmed 38 sexually transmitted Zika cases out of 4,575 in the U.S.

That's why the CDC continues to tell people the best prevention practice is to slather on bug spray containing DEET -- even if they are clubbing on South Beach or walking the dog. CDC officials say the products are safe for pregnant women and should be used by those expecting.

Since Aug. 1, there have been three sections of Miami-Dade County that at some point were classified as active transmission zones, placing them under the strict CDC "red" advisory that suggested pregnant women not travel there. The zones included the Wynwood area near downtown Miami, portions of South and North Miami Beach, and Little River.

People who did go there, or were residents, were advised to abstain from sex or "consistently" use condoms if they were pregnant, considering pregnancy or did not want to pass the virus. Women were told to follow these guidelines for eight weeks -- but men needed to do so for six months, as researchers believe Zika can live in seminal fluid for at least that long.

On Friday, Gov. Rick Scott declared the last of those areas, a 1.5-square mile tract in South Miami Beach, free of active transmission, lifting the CDC's no-travel recommendation for pregnant women. But the four former transmission zones, along with all of Miami-Dade County, remain under a "yellow" CDC advisory that includes condom use, abstinence and other precautions for expectant couples or people considering conceiving.

Sexual precautions also are suggested for anyone who has traveled to Zika outbreak countries such as portions of Mexico and Brazil, all of Puerto Rico, and many other countries. For a full list of travel advisories, go to: cdc.gov/travel or call 800-232-4636.

The CDC has drafted guidance for physicians and public health workers regarding Zika and sexual transmission. Officials with the Florida Department of Health said they discuss Zika sex guidelines with their patients and put condoms in the Zika prevention kits distributed to pregnant women.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), a global patient care and education organization, has three three large billboard advertisements -- including one with a giant three-dimensional mosquito -- in Miami-Dade County promoting condom use for Zika prevention.

Michael Kahane, AHF's southern bureau chief, said the organization has been distributing condoms along with Zika fact sheets in South Florida and Jamaica, as well as in Puerto Rico, where public health officials predict one in four residents may become Zika postive.

In the Caribbean countries, "people assume everyone already has it or is going to get it. So getting infected is no big deal unless you're pregnant," Kahane said.

While Kahane said that while there has been public health education about Zika, "a lot of people in the U.S. have told me they had no idea it could be sexually transmitted," Kahane said. "I think the general public just isn't aware."

A stroll though Fort Lauderdale's Himmarshee Village entertainment district on an early December night, where diners and drinkers filled outdoor tables, suggested Kahane might be right.

"SIX MONTHS?" cried Adrienne Airhart, 32, when asked how long she thought Zika might live in semen. Airhart, a Los Angeles visitor who had just finished a guided bike trip of the area's bars with pals, had guessed 22 months.

"That's really terrifying," said Airhart, who used to live in Coral Springs. "I am totally not going to Miami."

Her also surprised boyfriend, Aristotle Georgeson, 28, said he didn't know having sex could spread Zika. "So I would definitely let my partner know if I felt sick," he said.

But did he know that there was only a 20 percent chance he would even know he had a Zika infection? That's a problem, he agreed. "And it's not like I can look at a mosquito and know it had Zika," he said.

Dr. Aaron Elkin, a Hollywood obstetrician-gynecologist and past president of the Broward County Medical Association, said the majority of his patients "absolutely" are changing their health and sexual practices due to Zika.

"We are seeing more and more people living in our area afraid of becoming pregnant," said Elkin, who has been involved with federal Zika policy as a John McCain Fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. "A lot of them are asking me, 'What should I do?' They are very receptive when we talk about steps they can take."

Elkin now does Zika counseling during every prenatal visit, as recommended by the CDC, and patients can pick up free condoms at the office's front desk. His practice is one of the few that, at this point, can run and process Zika tests, cutting wait times for results. So far, Elkin has screened over 200 patients for the virus and predicts, in the future, Zika testing will become a prenatal care standard, as it has for HIV.

Some couples are opting to hold off conception until a Zika vaccine is available, Elkin said, which could be within two years. If the biological clock is ticking, others are willing to move out of the area until their baby arrives.

The majority of South Floridians determined to conceive, however, stay here and wrestle with Zika.

"You can't stop mosquitoes, you can't stop travel and you can't stop sex," Elkin said. "We need to think about how we deal with patients who live here. We can't just say nobody who lives in Miami-Dade can get pregnant until there's a vaccine."

The number of in-vitro fertilizations performed at the Fertility & IVF Center of Miami has been slightly lower this year over last, said medical director Dr. Michael Jacobs, although he is not sure that is due to Zika. A few couples, before Miami-Dade County came under the CDC advisory, earlier this year froze sperm because the male partner was traveling repeatedly to Zika hot zone countries, Jacobs said.

He suspects that some people, including pregnant couples, aren't following all of the CDC Zika prevention recommendations, from applying bug repellent to using condoms. Jacobs said when Miami Beach still had active transmission zones, he spotted a very pregnant woman picnicking outdoors.

"It's all over the news, you are about to give birth, and you are standing next to water with a bunch of mosquitoes in it. I don't understand it," Jacobs said.

dlade@sunsentinel.com and 954-356-4295

SEX AND ZIKA

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest expectant couples or those considering conceiving in the near future take these sexual precautions. Pregnant women are those most at risk, as the Zika virus can cause severe fetal abnormalities, but anyone can get Zika through sex. Common Zika symptoms include: fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes.

Women who live in Miami-Dade County or frequently travel there should wait eight weeks before trying to become pregnant. They should abstain from sex or consistently use condoms during this time.

Men who live in Miami-Dade County or frequently travel there should wait six months before trying to get their partner pregnant. They should abstain from sex or consistently use condoms during this time.

Expectant couples where one or both partners either live or have traveled to Miami-Dade County should consistently use condoms, or abstain from sex, until after delivery.

The above guidelines also apply to couples in which one partner has traveled to a country with active Zika transmision.

For more information on Zika prevention: cdc.gov or 800-232-4636âˆš.

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â€˜Pizzagateâ€™ Recalls the Debunked Child Sex Rings of the â€™80s and â€™90s

1:30 PM Bilal Muazin No comments

Front entrance of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, a restaurant in Washington, DC that's been at the center of a media conspiracy theory involving child sex abuse rings.

Front entrance of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, a restaurant in Washington, D.C., thatâ€™s been at the center of a media conspiracy theory involving child sex abuse rings. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Pizzagate,Â a nutty conspiracy theory about a child sex ring run from a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, has become the focal point for the â€œfake newsâ€ alarmâ€"particularly after a rifle-toting man recentlyÂ >showed up at the restaurantÂ to â€œself-investigateâ€ and rescue nonexistent victims. While no one was injured, the incident lent an eerie prescience to an earlier Washington Post >editorial titled, â€œ â€˜Pizzagateâ€™ shows how fake news hurts real people.â€ The politics of Pizzagateâ€"mostly pushed by Donald Trump supporters (including >Michael J. Flynn, son of Trumpâ€™s national security adviser-to-be Michael T. Flynn) and purported to implicate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief John Podestaâ€"make it even more emblematic of the â€œfake newsâ€ issue. To >many pundits, this is terrifying evidence of the dark irrationality unleashed by the Trump campaign.

The Pizzagate saga is indeed disturbing. An obscure reference in one of >Podestaâ€™s hacked emailsâ€"a handkerchief with â€œa map that seems pizza-relatedâ€â€"was somehow deemed a code for child sex. From there spun a web of wild allegations with >everything thrown in: an >Instagram joke about restraining unruly children with tape; heart- and butterfly-shaped images supposedly resembling pedophilic symbols; >the name of pizzeria owner, James Alefantis, is said to be rearranged from the French Jâ€™aime les enfantsÂ (â€œI love childrenâ€). The restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, >received a barrage of threatening phone calls and online messages even before the visit from the gunman; the harassment also spread to neighboring businesses.

Is it scary that peopleâ€™s lives can be severely disrupted, even endangered by baseless, zealotry-driven accusations of evil acts? Of course. Is this a danger uniquely linked to â€œfake newsâ€ and online vigilantes with a right-wing bent? Fairly recent history suggests otherwise.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of notorious cases involving allegations of ritual child sex abuse rings in day care centers swept the country. In California, the infamous >McMartin Preschool case dragged on for six years before its ignominious end in 1990. (The trial ended with one defendant acquitted and the otherâ€"Ray Buckey, the sole male defendantâ€"acquitted on most counts with the jury deadlocked on a few more. All charges against five other accused employees had been dismissed earlier.)

The McMartin case began with accusations made by a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia whose allegations quickly escalated to madhouse material: A few months after her initial police report, she was claiming that her son had his ears and tongue stapled, that children were forced to drink the blood of a slaughtered infant and that Buckey â€œflew through the air.â€ Before long, small children were coaxed into telling fantastical talesÂ of grotesque sexual acts, Satanic rites and animal sacrifice, often taking place in secret tunnels underneath the preschool, at other times in car washes and churches.

And where were the professional news media? Falling for it hook, line and sinker. Later, in 1990, Los Angeles Times reporter David Shaw won a Pulitzer Prize for a >multipart series that offered a devastating analysis of the McMartin media coverage, including that of his own paper. Among the faults of the press, he listed â€œpack journalism,â€ â€œlaziness,â€ excessive coziness with the prosecution (Wayne Satz, the reporter covering the case for the local NBC News station was quite literally in bed with Kee MacFarlane, the social worker in charge of the childrenâ€™s interviews) and â€œa competitive zeal that sends reporters off in a frantic search to be first with the latest shocking allegation.â€ As a result, Shaw wrote, â€œReporters and editors often abandoned two of their most cherished and widely trumpeted traditionsâ€"fairness and skepticism,â€ instead embracing â€œhysteria, sensationalism and what one editor calls â€˜a lynch-mob syndrome.â€™ â€ Â

Alas, this was typical of how the media treated the bogus day care sex abuse cases. In New Jersey in 1987, 25-year-old kindergarten teacher >Margaret Kelly Michaels was convicted on charges that included forcing 3- and 4-year-olds into naked orgies, raping them with utensils, urinating on them and making them eat her feces. (The childrenâ€™s â€œdisclosuresâ€ were elicited under highly coercive questioning, in an investigation triggered by one little boyâ€™s misconstrued comment.) These horrors were utterly improbable given the lack of physical evidence and lack of privacy in the room where Michaels supposedly committed her crimes. Yet once again, media skepticism was absent. It took two journalists outside the political mainstreamâ€"Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal on the right, Debbie Nathan on the leftâ€"to raise obvious questions about the case. Michaels spent five years behind bars, out of a 47-year sentence, before her conviction was overturned on appeal.

The 1980s sex abuse panic was a mainstream hysteria while Pizzagate is a fringe one; but the two have uncanny similarities. In both cases, things ranging from innocuous to eccentric to mildly inappropriate got recast as suggesting pedophile proclivitiesâ€"particularly if they could be seen as sexually â€œcreepy.â€ Today, Pizzagate â€œsleuthsâ€ find it >incriminating that Comet Ping Pong, an >offbeat arty venue, has had weird murals with abstract nudes and that some of its employeesâ€™ Instagram accounts have featured bawdy (nonâ€"child-related) cartoons. Thirty years ago, Buckey and Michaels were portrayed as perverts because he sometimes wore loose shorts with no underwear and she had scribbled a vaguely erotic poem in her notebook.

The child sex abuse panic of the 1980s is also a reminder that paranoia about pedophiles is hardly the sole province of right-wing nuts. While some of the fears about devil worship were driven by religious fundamentalism, feminists who saw hidden child rape as an intrinsic part of patriarchal violence played a >major role in ritual abuse scare. (They were even more involved in the closely related >bogus moral panic about recovered memories of incest, also treated with excessive credulity by the mainstream media until the early 1990s.) Indeed, MacFarlane, one of principal malfeasants in the McMartin fiasco, had >started out as a feminist activist before turning child abuse crusader.

During the McMartin case, in 1989, the Los Angeles County Commission on Women >launched a Ritual Abuse Task Force headed by feminist psychotherapist >Myra Riddell. Womenâ€™s liberation doyenne Gloria Steinem not only >endorsed a 1990 recovered-memory manual that encouraged women to see everything from arthritis to trust issues as symptoms of forgotten abuse but >helped fund a futile quest for evidence of guilt in the McMartin case. And as late as 1993, Ms. magazine ran a lurid cover story purporting to be a survivorâ€™s account, headlined, â€œRitual Abuse Existsâ€"Believe It!â€

So let us by all means decry the conspiracy theories and the â€œfake newsâ€ of today. But we would do well to remember that even real journalists and cultural progressives are not immune to absurd claims of pedophile conspiracies when the right buttons get pushed. And as much as one can sympathize with innocent people harassed and threatened because of Pizzagate, the plight of innocents imprisoned on horrific made-up charges was far worse.

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Yorktown pastor accused of sex with teen

11:00 AM Bilal Muazin No comments

Terry Dobbs(Photo: Photo provided)

MUNCIE, Ind. â€" The pastor of a Yorktown church was being held in the Delaware County jail on Friday, accused of having sexÂ with a 15-year-old member of his congregation.

Terry Wayne Dobbs, 53 â€" pastor at Old Fashion United Baptist Church, 9211 W. Arch St. â€" was arrested Thursday evening, preliminarily charged with sexual misconduct with a minor, vicarious sexual gratification, child exploitation and child solicitation.

The pastorâ€™s bond was set at $35,000.

According to an affidavit, Yorktown police learned from authorities in Allen County on Dec. 2 that a 15-year-old girl had disclosed she was involved in a sexual relationship with her minister.

A Yorktown officer interviewed the girl Thursday. She said she began counseling with Dobbs about personal problems in July.

According to the report, the pastor â€œstarted out very slowly with talking about kissing her.â€

Authorities allege Dobbs and the girl eventually began fondling each other at the church, and later had sex there three times.

The alleged victim also said she and the minister had exchanged nude photos via cellphones and computers.

Dobbs, of the 6900 block of West Bethel Avenue, was also interviewed on Thursday, and gave a â€œfull confession,â€ police reported.

Courts records reflect no prior charges against Dobbs.

Contact news reporter Douglas Walker at (765) 213-5851. Follow him on Twitter: @DouglasWalkerSP.

Read or Share this story: http://tspne.ws/2htHldg

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â€˜Pizzagateâ€™ Recalls the Debunked Child Sex Rings of the â€™80s and â€™90s

10:30 AM Bilal Muazin No comments

Front entrance of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, a restaurant in Washington, DC that's been at the center of a media conspiracy theory involving child sex abuse rings.

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