Revisiting global health from the periphery: the Zika virus

Abstract

Bioethics professor Debora Diniz of the University of Brasilia has written a beautiful as well as compelling account of the tragic months between the first alerts of the Zika virus and the official efforts by the Brazilian government and the scientific community to contain the virus in the country while preventing its expansion worldwide. What may have been expected to be a clean account of how the virus was discovered and finally quashed instead is a dramatic narrative of the complex, tense, and at times contradictory actions and decisions taken to fight an enemy with a none-too-clear identity. The original version of the book, Zika: do sertão nordestino à ameaça global, was accompanied by an award-winning documentary which is now available on YouTube. Diniz is also the co-founder of Anis: Institute of Bioethics, which focuses on the intersection of bioethics and human rights in Latin America.The text goes beyond a simple chronicle of Zika's spread, and maintains an impressively personal touch while describing the technical and scientific procedures. One of its main goals is to introduce a clear narrative of the problem as well as the intricate and simultaneous paths adopted by physicians and scientists until the virus was confirmed to be Zika. Unlike other narratives of epidemics, where the focus centers on how the disease was contained and describes an active, organized team effort, the picture that emerges from this episode is a rich yet somber scenario of actors, policies, and non-human agents. The ethnographic perspective pays off, allowing readers to follow mothers mourning their newborns, bitter disputes among scientists, and the way in which government offices deliberately ignored contributions from the Brazilian northeast. Zika and its carrier become an excuse to dissect how science is produced, contested, and legitimized as the result of myriad regional, gender, and professional tensions. At the same time, science is elegantly disassembled into its basic units to restore the humanity behind it.Diniz has done a remarkable job explaining the complex genealogy of the virus in lay terms, from its isolation in Uganda in 1947 until its last known outbreak in French Polynesia.

Ensemble forecasting of the Zika space‐time spread with topological data analysis

“…The map in Figure 4 suggests that the BMA–RMSE approach delivers the highest predictive performance for all considered states. Remarkably, among the best predicted states using the BMA–RMSE approach are the states with the highest infection rates, that is, Mato Grosso, Goias, and Mato Grosso do Sul (see also Figure 5 showing the average Zika rates and Ragas, ).…”