Zika by Donald G. McNeil Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t know if it’s only that, or maybe it’s a combination. If a pregnant woman has had dengue a year before, gets an immunological reaction, and then gets Zika . . .”
    I wrote a brief story with the basics, and after I filed it, I sent a long note to Tom Skinner, the chief spokesman for Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the CDC. It was headlined, apologetically, “Merry Christmas and let’s make Tom Skinner crazy during Xmas season.” If he had any days off, I was probably going to ruin them.
    I had just written something brief about a new virus called Zika, I said. It was a huge problem in Brazil, suspected of causing a 20-fold increase in microcephaly, and women were being advised not to get pregnant. I was going to have to follow up with a major story, hopefully with help from the Times ’s Brazil bureau.
    When I do that, I said, I’ll need to include the CDC’s thoughts on how fearful Americans should be. 
    The agency’s website indicated that some American travelers were getting the disease and bringing it home, and there would likely be outbreaks in the United States.
    Americans were going to want answers to some questions, I wrote, including these:
    1.Should Americans be concerned that Zika could spread in the United States and cause brain damage in children?
    2.Should Americans avoid going to Brazil now?
    3.What other countries should they avoid?
    4.Should Americans cancel plans to go to the Olympics?
    5.Should American athletes avoid the Games? Or should some subset of the team, like pregnant athletes or female athletes?
    Could he please, I asked, put me on the phone with someone as soon as possible?
    His email auto-reply said he was off until January 4. But he wrote back within 20 minutes, saying, “We should be able to make this work. Let me see who is around. What is your drop-dead deadline?”
    Depends on my editors, I replied, but by tomorrow afternoon, please.
    Three hours later, another CDC spokesperson wrote back saying Dr. Erin Staples, an epidemiologist in vector-borne diseases, would be available early the next afternoon.
    In those three hours, my editors had heard from the foreign desk. Simon Romero, our Rio bureau chief, had interrupted his own vacation to work on a piece about the emergency. It would be offered for page one, so I could file paragraphs about the American situation into it.
    Dr. Staples and I spoke the next afternoon. She described the risk to the United States—that it was carried by the same “yellow fever mosquito,” Aedes aegypti , that carried dengue and chikungunya, so the agency expected the spread to be similar: Puerto Rico would be hit hard. There would probably be small clusters of cases in Florida, in Texas, and along the Gulf Coast—and possibly also in Hawaii. The CDC did not expect anywhere in the mainland to be hit as hard as Puerto Rico would be.
    But, she warned, nothing was clear-cut: mosquito control budgets were set by states or counties, and they waxed and waned. They had gotten fatter when West Nile virus was a threat, but that was 15 years back, and West Nile was spread by different mosquitoes and had to be fought differently. The small dengue and chikungunya outbreaks since then hadn’t moved the budget needle. And there was very little money for surveillance—which meant trapping and typing mosquitoes regularly—so nobody really knew the true range of the yellow fever mosquito. The maps were old. And there was another wrinkle: a related mosquito, the “Asian tiger mosquito,” Aedes albopictus , could also transmit Zika. The tiger mosquito tolerated colder winters and survived much farther north.
    On the other hand, she said, nobody was sure how “efficiently” the tiger mosquito transmitted Zika.
    (Mosquitoes can be “inefficient transmitters” if viruses don’t grow as well in them, or because they wander off to bite birds or deer or something