At the end of the rainy season, it’s a real psychosis that wins Brazil. The country has been facing a predator 5 millimeters long, but particularly formidable since last December. This mosquito, Aedes aegyptialready well known for transmitting dengue fever and chikungunya, plunged the country into a state of health emergency by adding the Zika virus to its monstrous panoply (1).
By a bite on pregnant women, it can cause a fetal malformation, microcephaly. “Infants are born with a head circumference of less than 33 centimeters and irreversible mental retardation, when they manage to survive”, explains The world.
So to fight the enemy, future mothers equip themselves with an anti-mosquito bomb. Like Luciana Almeida, this 36-year-old woman who is expecting twins, and whose anxieties are told by Claire Gatinois, the correspondent for Le Monde. Luciana knows that the most critical period is in the first trimester of pregnancy and that the disease can develop without any warning symptoms.
And the latest bulletin from the Ministry of Health is not likely to reassure her. It lists 3,174 suspected cases in one month compared to 150 per year in the past. Until then localized in the states of the Northeast, the Zika virus has won 684 cities and threatens megacities. Six cases already detected in Sao Paulo, 118 in the state of Rio de Janeiro where the Olympic Games are to be held next August.
“Within four to five years, Brazil could experience 100,000 cases of microcephaly,” estimates an expert interviewed by the daily.
In this fierce race, the country lacks means. The economic crisis, the concentration of the inhabitants in the big cities, the often dubious conditions of evacuation of water make the specialists fear a disaster.
The other countries are not immune, recalls the journalist. “Colombia, Guatemala, French Guiana, Puerto Rico, Honduras… In total, a dozen countries or territories have been affected since 2015”.
An expert goes even further: “All countries that have suffered from dengue epidemics have had, or will have, an epidemic of Zika”. Sylvain Aldighieri, of the Pan American Health Organization, does a simple calculation: ” The virus is transmissible for five days and we can now cover 20,000 kilometers in less than twenty-four hours. »
(1) In adults, but more rarely, the insect can cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disease that can cause paralysis.
