What if the virus never really goes away, or another one appears, and the young have to live with pandemics forever? “It scares me a lot,” nursing assistant Ludernilce Peixoto Costa said. “It’s an uncertain future.”
to pathogens. In Brazil, Zika, the mosquito-borne virus that causes devastating birth defects, is a prime example. Scientists say deforestation has contributed to record heat and droughts that cause more people to store water in open containers — excellent breeding grounds for mosquitoes. With global warming, these vectors will probably, breeding in parts of North America, Europe and East Asia where it had previously been too cold.
The community here revolves around the small neo-Pentecostal church Iracema helped build. The church’s national leaders have claimed that the coronavirus is caused by Satan and will not hurt those who are not afraid of it. The whole family has declined to take the vaccine. Thousands of people in Manaus died in two separate surges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just about everyone in this city of 2 million people knows someone who died a slow and excruciating death after local hospitals ran out of oxygen. Officials bulldozed parts of the jungle for space to bury the dead.
Peixoto wonders: What if the virus never really goes away, or another one appears, and the young have to live with pandemics forever? Vasconcelos was busy making sure children didn’t fall behind while schools were closed when last year she, her husband and their 9-year-old daughter fell ill. Nava is a virus hunter. As a researcher with Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a government-run lab, she spends her days in and around Manaus taking samples from primates, rodents and bats. Those specimens are helping build up the institution’s biobank — a library of the viruses that are circulating among animals in the jungle.
But many zoologists consider it too ambitious. Estimates suggest the project would cost about $1.6 billion over a decade to identify 75% of all the world’s viruses. And even a library of them all wouldn’t reveal which could be transmitted between humans. Some scientists think a wiser approach is convincing specific groups of people to adopt less risky behaviors: wet-market workers, mink farmers, chimpanzee hunters — and perhaps families living on the fringe of the forest, like Darah Lady’s.
If people truly care about avoiding future pandemics, she said, they will realize that the best approach is not her own — trying to learn about viruses before they take root in humans — but to stop their spread altogether.* * * Oliveira says if scientists want Brazil to stop cutting down the rainforest, they should compensate those living there. “Pay me to preserve it and I will preserve it,” he said on a recent morning, sipping coffee in an open-air gazebo with his wife and his wife’s mother while Darah Lady sat in Sunday school at the community’s little church.“Coming from the outside, you want the forest to remain standing,” he said. “That’s wonderful. But I live here in the forest.
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