A Month with Mylene: A Video Slideshow

I first met Mylene Helena dos Santos Ferreira, 23, in July 2017 at the outpatient clinic at IMIP (Instituto de Medicina Integral Professor Fernando Figueira) Hospital, where she had brought her son Davi for one of his routine medical exams. Davi was born in August 2015 with congenital Zika syndrome.

Brazil, the epicenter of the Zika outbreak, caught global attention in 2015 with a surge in newborn babies born with small heads due to a birth defect called microcephaly. There are currently thousands of confirmed and suspected cases of congenital Zika virus syndrome in Brazil, many of which are clustered in the country’s northeast region.

This video slideshow chronicles my month with Mylene, as the young mother of three navigates routine experiences of daily life and motherhood that have assumed a heightened precariousness since the Zika outbreak. The challenges faced by Mylene as a caregiver in the margins of Brazilian society exposes the ways in which social vulnerabilities can be exacerbated if the rights and needs of women are not guaranteed in an epidemic response.

See also other GHN exclusive pieces from Poonam Daryani's reporting in Brazil: 

Beyond Mosquitoes: Sexual and Reproductive Health in the Wake of Zika 
October 10, 2017

The Other Children in Brazil's Zika Epidemic 
October 9, 2017

Poonam Daryani received her MPH from Johns Hopkins University in May 2017 and is currently a Clinical Fellow with the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership. Her reporting for this story was supported by the Johns Hopkins-Pulitzer Center Global Health Reporting Fellowship.

Interpretation was provided by Rafael Alkalai, Tiago Cabral, Adriana Bentes dos Santos, and Margarida Corrêa Neto.

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