Showing posts with label microcephaly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label microcephaly. Show all posts

1 February 2016

For Brazil's rich and poor, disparate response to Zika

In this Jan. 29, 2016 photo, Tainara Lourenco smiles as she chats with neighbors from the entrance of home at a slum in Recife, Brazil. Unemployed and five months pregnant, 21-year-old Lourenco lives in a slum at the epicenter of Brazil’s tandem Zika and microcephaly outbreaks, the state of Pernambuco.
Two Brazilian women, two pregnancies, one nightmare. But two very different stories.
Regina de Lima and Tainara Lourenco became pregnant at a scary moment — the dawn of an extraordinary Zika outbreak, as authorities came to suspect that the virus was causing an alarming spike in a rare birth defect called microcephaly. Both have reason to fear for the health of their unborn offspring.
But that is where the similarities end.