The 2015-16 Zika epidemic spread quickly from north to south in Brazil. Two striking features were the much higher incidence in young adult women due to sexual transmission, and the serious congenital malformations and miscarriages associated to Zika infection in pregnant women. In this paper we use case reporting data along with live-birth records to reconstruct the full size of the epidemic through a Bayesian probabilistic graph model representing the Zika transmission probabilities of observation (case reporting) and of birth loss (through miscarriage or abortion). We find that the probability of observing (reporting) a Zika case is different between men and women and ranges between 10 to 13%. From these estimates we reconstruct the full size of the Zika epidemic in Rio de Janeiro in 2015-16.

publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. S424 European Congress of Epidemiology / Revue d'Épidémiologie et de Santé Publique 66S (2018) S277-S437Conclusions Our results replicate those obtained by other studies developed with very different methodologies, which means that RWD, if adequately managed and analysed, is a good method to do clinical research. As this data is collected in a continuous way, rather than point-to-point, it will allow using all the information of a given patient, without the restrictions of the ad-hoc research.

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