About 80% of people infected with Zika virus show no symptoms, and that's particularly problematic during pregnancy. The infection can cause birth defects and is the origin of numerous cases of microcephaly and other neurologic impairments.
The large amount of Aedes aegypti mosquitos in Brazilian cities, in addition to social and political problems, facilitated the spread of Zika to the point that the country recorded its highest number of congenital Zika syndrome notifications from 2015 to 2018. Since then, researchers have investigated the extent of the problem.
One of the most compelling findings about the dramatic legacy of Zika in Brazil was recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine: after tracking a total of 11,481,215 children born alive in Brazil up to 36 months of age between the years 2015 and 2018, the researchers found that the mortality rate was about 12 times higher among children with congenital Zika syndrome in comparison to children without the syndrome. The study is the first to follow children with congenital Zika syndrome for 3 years and to report mortality in this group.
"This difference persisted throughout the first 3 years of life," Enny Cruz Paixão, PhD, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in London, and Fiocruz-Bahia's Instituto Gonçalo Moniz, in Brazil, commented in an interview with
