“How Hipsters Are Spreading Zika in Miami”

Yes, that’s the title of a monumentally stupid article (linked by hysteria-monger Drudge, natch) which blames “hipsters” for apparently helping to make yet another dangerous substance (water) readily available to mosquitoes.

“Generally around construction sites, you have catchments of water in any number of things: pails, buckets, trash,” said Conlon. “Anything around a construction site that can hold water is fair game.”

According to the CDC, almost all of the 14 cases of locally-transmitted Zika that were recently announced in Florida can be attributed to the Wynwood area and its immediate surroundings like the emerging Midtown shopping area and the luxury Design District. A CDC emergency response team is on the ground—where local sprayers have already been working overtime—and aerial spraying of the area is expected to begin shortly.

Wynwood was not always a hot spot for $12 juices, swanky Art Basel parties and, now, Zika. The neighborhood was—and in many places, still is—home to low-income residents hailing from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba.

But in the 2000s, developers started eyeing the neighborhood. David Lombardi of Lombardi Properties first took stock of Wynwood in 2001. The official Lombardi Properties website claims that he “discovered the Wynwood neighborhood” and realized that “Miami’s creatives could live, work and play” there.

Then, in the mid 2000s, Goldman Properties began buying up substantial amounts of Wynwood property, with an eye toward transforming the area into the next SoHo. The businesses and art galleries quickly followed, drawing tourists and Miami elite alike to an area of the city that was once completely off their radar.

Dr. Marcos Feldman, an assistant professor of sociology at Northeastern Illinois University, wrote a 2011 dissertation exploring the effects of Wynwood gentrification on longtime residents like Marta, a Cuban woman, who told Feldman: “Everything here is now galleries. They’ll [eventually] take this house for a gallery. There in front [of my house] a factory was emptied—gallery, everything is gallery, gallery, gallery!”

Marta also complained about the trash left by visitors in the wake of events like Art Basel: “The people are so dirty, they leave bottles, everything thrown there in front of people’s houses.”

Now, the roofs of these galleries and the insides of those bottles could have literally given birth to the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that contracted Zika from an infected individual and transmitted it locally.

“A lot of the buildings have flat roofs that are holding a lot of water,” Yoel Gutierrez, the owner of a local Mosquito Joe franchise, told The Daily Beast. “So, for my customers in Wynwood that have businesses, we actually get up there and we throw some larvicide in there because they do have a lot of standing water and that water has nowhere to go.”

There are other likely breeding grounds, Gutierrez noted, including nearby residences. But wherever the mosquitoes are breeding in the neighborhood, it is clear that the influx of tourists and international travelers made it a likely ground zero for the local transmission of the virus.

“I wasn’t too surprised that it started there,” he said.

Right. Hipsters, gentrification, whoever. Blame whatever you hate for whatever diseases you might fear.

I’m reminded of George Carlin.

(I should add that I say this as someone who can’t stand hipsters…)