A year on, mothers of Brazil’s zika babies struggle

RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil’s 2015-2016 zika scare has largely dropped out of the headlines, but one year on, thousands of parents are struggling as they learn to care for brain-damaged babies.

Brenda Pereira, 23, weeps in dismay as she leaves the doctor’s room with her four-month- old daughter Maria Fernanda in her arms.

The pediatrician has just told her that Maria Fernanda’s case of microcephaly is worse than previously thought.

The zika disease, spread by mosquito bites, causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads.

“I hope she will be able to speak. That she will be as normal as possible,” says Pereira.

“That is why I bring her to the doctor: to try to make her fit into society. Because people do not see our children as people.”

Brazil has confirmed 2,289 cases of babies born with microcephaly in the epidemic that started in 2015. Authorities say there are 3,144 other suspected cases pending confirmation.

Since most of those babies are no more than a year old, Brazilian doctors’ experience of treating them is limited.

In cases like Maria Fernanda’s, the doctors do not have answers to all the parents’ questions.

“If the doctors do not know, then how can I?” she says. “I have learned to live with her because I must.”

Pereira, from Rocinha, Rio’s biggest slum, only learned her baby had the condition after Maria Fernanda was born.

The baby’s father abandoned her, she says, because he did not want “a sick daughter.”

Pereira had to leave her job to care for the baby 24 hours a day. She moved in with her own mother, leaving her other daughter, aged six, with relatives.

She struggles to pay for the physiotherapy sessions Maria Fernanda needs to stimulate her.

Maria Fernanda does not qualify to receive child disability welfare payments from the state, because Pereira’s own mother is above the 70-a-month earnings threshold. She works selling bags of ice on Ipanema beach. — AFP