Zika by Donald G. McNeil

said. After they left, it turned out that two children in his friend’s family compound had also gotten it. “So that’s why I suspected it.”
    It was a good call. I later learned from reading PowerPoints by Dr. Mallet, the French Polynesia epidemiologist, that the week they were there was the outbreak’s absolute apex. Doctors on the 76 inhabited islands were reporting new cases at the rate of 3,600 a week. The Guillain-Barré, Stephen said, he had heard about from a local journalist who was a friend, who had heard about it from a doctor or nurse and was still looking into it.
    In Dyan’s journal article about his case, Stephen, like Joy Chilson Foy, appears only as a rash-covered back. “I’m a curious person, so it’s kind of cool to be my own scientific experiment,” he said in February. “But now I’m Zika Man. So hey—I should get a costume!”

9

    The Rumors
    T HE RUMORS STARTED just as the first alarm bells began to ring, well before the CDC issued its travel advisories or the WHO declared a public health emergency.
    The pictures of the children in Brazil were so shocking that people seemed to have a hard time believing that an otherwise mild disease had done such damage. They reminded many of the aftermath of major disasters: radiation victims from Hiroshima, children deformed by thalidomide or Agent Orange or by mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan.
    The rumors were similar: the virus was not the real cause. The media was a bunch of gullible idiots. The real cause was X.
    Some rumors I read about in other publications or by following links down the rabbit holes of the Internet. Some I learned about because readers wrote to me, saying more or less that I was the gullible idiot and should look into cause X.
    According to the first rumor, the culprit was genetically modified mosquitoes released in Brazil to fight dengue.
    Another put the blame on some form of chemical pesticide. The first version of that rumor that I heard claimed it was Roundup, the herbicidal weed killer. The second, which became much more tenacious, was that it was a larvicide put into standing water to kill mosquito larvae, including the drinking water barrels that millions of poor Brazilians had attached to pipes running off the tin roofs of their shacks.
    A third set of rumors blamed it on vaccines. One version held that Brazil had imported a bad batch of rubella vaccine, so mothers were left unprotected, and rubella was known to cause microcephaly. Another version pointed to the new vaccine against pertussis—whooping cough—that Brazil had recently introduced.
    Another rumor—which caused me a lot of difficulty because it was initially argued persuasively by a prominent Yale mosquito researcher working in Brazil—maintained that there was actually no surge in microcephaly cases at all. It was all just a big misunderstanding. Brazil, the argument went, had seriously undercounted its microcephaly cases for years. Now that a few hospitals had had clusters—and clusters are normal in statistics—the media panic had led the health ministry to alert doctors all over the country, who were now reporting every child with a small head. It was just a massive overcount.
    For several weeks, I felt I was just putting out fires. Serious news developments were taking place, including the WHO’s emergency declaration. But everything seemed to feed the rumors. For example, when Dr. Chan and Dr. Heymann announced the PHEIC, they emphasized that the emergency was not the rapid spread of the virus but the suspected microcephaly connection, and Dr. Chan’s words were particularly cautious: “Although a causal link between Zika infection in pregnancy and microcephaly—and I must emphasize—has not been established, the circumstantial evidence is suggestive and extremely worrisome.”
    That caveat—that it was not established, after all those days of headlines