Via The Washington Post: The panic is over at Zika’s epicenter. But for many, the struggle has just begun. Excerpt:
RECIFE, Brazil — In this city at the heart of the Zika outbreak, the gloom and dread have lifted from maternity hospitals and delivery rooms.
The scary government posters with giant mosquitoes have mostly come down. Fertility clinics are busy again. At one public hospital that has delivered 1,700 newborns over the past five months, doctors haven’t seen a single case of Zika-related birth defects.
“It’s as if we’ve all forgotten about Zika,” said Erika Alcantara, 17 weeks pregnant, who had waited for the epidemic to pass before she and her husband tried for their second child.
A year after U.N. health officials declared Zika a global emergency, the city that produced some of the outbreak’s most terrifying and indelible images of badly deformed infants feels like a place that has mostly moved on.
But not everyone has bounced back so fast. Not the parents of the babies in those heartbreaking photographs.
Initially, many feared that the infants would be merely the first wave of Zika victims, with many more to follow. Yet as the virus spread across the Americas and infected hundreds of thousands, it did not inflict the kind of damage seen here in northeast Brazil, where three-quarters of Zika-related birth defects have been reported.
Today those families are like the survivors of a natural disaster. Though Zika scared a lot of people, its lasting harm fell on a relative few.
Those families have developed new routines. Eliane Paz ferries her son, Davi Lucas, to five different hospitals a week for visual, motor and auditory therapy. The 1-year-old was diagnosed with severe microcephaly when he was born in October 2015, weeks before doctors connected the condition to Zika. Paz, a former maid, wakes up at 4 a.m. to make the 90-minute journey to the rehabilitation centers where specialists work with her son.
Recife’s rehab clinics are crowded with children who have microcephaly, a congenital condition defined by undersize heads and impaired cognition. Now toddlers, they struggle to swallow, roll over or simply hold up their heads. Many languish in a semi-vegetative state.
Their parents say they live for milestones that others take for granted. When their children learn to smile, laugh or grip items, it’s just enough to stave off the despair.
