Detektivische Jagd auf das Zika-Virus
The Search to Explain Birth Defects in Brazil Led to a Mosquito-Borne Virus
This article is by Donald G. McNeil Jr., Simon Romero and Sabrina Tavernise.
Something strange was happening last August in the maternity wards of Recife, a city perched on Brazil’s easternmost tip, where the country juts into the Atlantic.
“Doctors, pediatricians, neurologists, they started finding this thing we never had seen,” said Dr. Celina M. Turchi, an infectious diseases researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a prominent scientific institute in Brazil.
“Children with normal faces up to the eyebrows, and then you have no foreheads and very strange heads,” she recalled, referring to the condition known as microcephaly. “The doctors were saying, ‘ Well, I saw four today,’ and, ‘Oh that’s strange, because I saw two.’ ”
Aside from their alarming appear- ance, many of the babies seemed healthy. “They cried,” Dr. Turchi said. “They breast- fed well. They just didn’t seem to be ill.” Doctors were stumped. They were seeing the first swell of a horrifying wave. A little-known pathogen — the Zika virus, carried by mosquitoes — had been circulating in Brazil for at least a year. It would become the chief suspect in what had happened to those newborns.
Since then, those tiny babies have led the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency. They have prompted warnings to pregnant women to avoid countries where the virus is circulating, even to refrain from unprotected sex with men who have visited those countries, following a recent report of sexual transmission of the virus in Texas.
They have led health ministers of five countries to say something that none had ever uttered before: Women, please delay having children. The virus now threatens the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. It has opened a new front in the debate in heavily Roman Catholic countries about birth control and abortion.
And the children stricken with microcephaly have doctors everywhere asking: What is this virus? How could it have been around for almost 70 years? What do we tell women who ask if their unborn babies are safe?
“This epidemic is an unfolding story,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States. “As with Ebola, this virus is something that could exist for years under the radar, and we don’t know until we get thousands of cases what it really does.”
To doctors in Recife, whatever was striking the babies seemed to have come as a complete surprise. In reality, it had been building for months.
Seeing the Same Symptoms
A year earlier, doctors say, the first patients had started trickling into hospitals in Natal, about 320 kilometers up the coast from Recife. It was a few weeks after the 2014 World Cup, and Natal had been one of the host cities of the soccer championship.
Almost all of the patients had the same symptoms: a flat pinkish rash, bloodshot eyes, fever, joint pain and