Via O Globo: Drama amplificado.[Drama intensified] Edited excerpt from the Google translation, and then a comment:
Rosa Angela took two days to accept the daughter who had just been born.
"She went to nursery, I was in a room. They asked then if I wanted her to go up to the room. They spent two days climbing, because I did not want to. Stay there with her, you know? I wasn't prepared. I cried, the psychologist came, he spoke. Then I settled down."
Still wearing braces on her teeth, the 17-year-old saw the face of microcephaly in her first daughter. Lara Safira was born three months ago with a skull diameter of 28 cm and took the family by surprise: Zika had not been diagnosed previously, although the mother had prenatal care and three ultrasounds during pregnancy.
Rosa Angela lives with her husband and their daughter in Itapissuma, municipality of the Metropolitan Region of Recife, about 45 km from the state capital which has the most registered cases of microcephaly in Brazil.
Rehabilitation needs more places
The tragedy that emerged with the revelation that pregnant women who contracted Zika virus had, because of the virus, babies with microcephaly - by the end of 2015, hundreds of babies in the country - is a sum of family tragedies.
This will be the real disaster: The coming years and decades when microcephaly has been forgotten in the rush of new health threats, but parents and communities will still have to do what they can for some people unlucky enough to have been born in 2015 and 2016.
