A infamia nazista e a dignidade atual de uma alemã - uma historia humana

Do Washington Post deste domingo, 15/04/2018:

Nazis seized his home during World War II. A letter recently arrived, expressing remorse.

by Eli Rosenberg

The Washington Post, April 15, 2018

The letter arrived for Peter Hirschmann with a postmark from Nuremberg, Germany, where he and his family had escaped from Nazis nearly 80 years ago.

The words, neat script in three pages, brought the 92-year-old resident of Maplewood, N.J., to tears. They were a message of remorse, sent by a German woman who began to investigate how her grandfather had acquired Hirschmann’s family home after it had been seized by the German government.

Doris Schott-Neuse, a 46-year-old civil servant, wanted to express her regret and ask Hirschmann for forgiveness, according to the Associated Press.

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“I am deeply ashamed for what us Germans did to yourself, your family and to your friends and relatives and to the members of the Nuremberg Jewish community,” she wrote. “It is hardly bearable to start thinking about the details — what a horror and nightmare it must have been to live through this.”

In an interview with the AP, Hirschmann recalled his old home on the outskirts of Nuremberg, an old Bavarian town where Nazis had created the Nuremberg Laws, a series of rules that deprived Jews of citizenship, in 1935.

Hirschmann’s father Julius was a businessman whose success was evident in the two-story, three-bedroom house.

“It was probably one of the nicer homes around according to the standards of the day,” Hirschmann said.

Peter Hirschmann at his home in Maplewood, N.J. (Julio Cortez/AP)

He remembers the changes his parents started to make after Nazis came to power and began implementing policies against the country’s Jewish population. After Jews were banned from using a local pool, his parents set up sprinklers for the children in their back yard.

“All of a sudden there was a sign up there: ‘Juden und Hunde Verboten,’ which means Jews and dogs not allowed,” Hirschmann recalled. The family fled Germany in 1939.

Schott-Neuse had begun to look into her own family history and how they came to acquire the house a few years after the Hirschmanns left.

Doris Schott-Neuse flips through a residents’ register from the 1930s in Nuremberg, Germany. (Matthias Schrader/AP)

Schott-Neuse, who lived in the house until she was five, dug through the city’s archives and found that Nazis had seized Hirschmann’s home. By 1941, Willi Muhr, her grandfather, was listed as its owner.

Schott-Neuse said her aunt, who inherited the house and later sold it when Schott-Neuse was five, told her that her grandparents had acquired the home after helping the previous owners escape to the United States. But Schott-Neuse said she had come to doubt the story about her grandparents after learning about the house’s history.

“I don’t know if I want to believe that any longer,” she said. “I thought he bought it directly from the Jewish owners but this doesn’t seem to be true.”

Instead, she has begun to assume her grandfather was connected to Nazis, given how nice the house was.

“That is what prompted me to write the letter, because I thought that the family also doesn’t know what happened and I wanted to say I’m so sorry, because it’s not done and over,” she said.

In her letter to Hirschmann, she wrote that the Holocaust and Nazi years were “lessons filled with numbers, data, and facts of the deeds of ‘them’ — the Nazis — and we felt that all that was something which was awful but that it happened in a faraway past. And I did not connect these history lessons to my family. My sister and I enjoyed a very happy childhood and connecting family with gruesome horrors did not work. I know that this was the same for my friends.”

The Hirschmann family was later paid restitution for the house that amounted to about a tenth of its prewar value, the AP reported.

The letter Schott-Neuse wrote Hirschmann. (Julio Cortez/AP)

Hirschmann and his family were able to flee Nazi Germany; his parents sent him and his brother to live with a relative in England in the hopes that Adolf Hitler’s time in office would be short, he said in an interview with The Washington Post.

But as conditions worsened for the Jews in Germany, Hirschmann’s parents were granted visas to come the United States in August 1939, just weeks before Hitler invaded Poland in what historians consider the start of World War II.

By the end of that year, the whole family was reunited in Newark, Hirschmann’s parents working menial jobs but happy to be living free. Hirschmann got a waiver to join the Army after his 18th birthday in 1942, even though he was still a German citizen.

An infantryman, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, the last major German offensive of the war, where he was captured along with other American troops. He spent the last five months of the war in a prisoner of war camp — he still remembers the dates, Dec. 16, 1944, to May 8, 1945 — telling his captors that he had learned German in high school to obscure his past and ethnicity.

“If he had found out my background, I would have been shot without any explanation,” he told AP.

Back in the United States, Hirschmann raised two children with his wife Merle, and had a successful career as an accountant and real estate broker. They have five grandchildren. He has been married for 55 years, and still goes to work at the office of the real estate company he owns just about every day.

He and his family had visited the home in Nuremberg decades ago during a trip to Germany, sitting down for tea with the young family that had purchased the place.

Then, decades later  the house came back to him again in the form of Schott-Neuse’s letter, which was mailed to his office.

“How she got the address to my office, I don’t yet know,” Hirschmann said.

“I give her a lot of credit for researching and finding him,” his wife, Merle, said.

Hirschmann wrote an email back to Schott-Neuse, according to the AP, telling her that she was blameless and writing that he was touched by her letter.

“You had the option to ignore it and instead you confronted it,” he wrote. “My tears reflect the fervent hope that the humanity, dignity, and compassion you have shown is shared by others of your generation and the generations to follow.”

Venezuela: os refugiados da fome - Peter Prengaman (The Washington Post)

The Washington Post, March 20, 2018

Northern Brazil overwhelmed by desperate, hungry Venezuelans Peter Prengaman    Hungry and destitute, tens of thousands of victims of Venezuela’s unrelenting political and economic crisis are trying their luck in Brazil — a country where they do not speak the language, conditions are often poor and there are few border towns to receive them.   Many arrive weak from hunger and with no money for a hotel, food or the $9 bus ride to Boa Vista, the capital of the Brazilian state of Roraima, known in Venezuelan circles as a place that offers three meals a day. In dozens of interviews over four days, many said they had not had more than one meal a day for the last year.   Some wore baggy clothes, had emaciated faces and complained of medical issues ranging from children with measles to diabetics with no insulin.   Kritce Montero tried to shush 6-month-old Hector, who cried from hunger even after breast-feeding while his family and several hundred other Venezuelans waited to be processed at the border.   Montero, who said she lost 57 pounds (26 kilograms) the last year from eating just one meal a day, traveled with Hector and her 7-year-old daughter 18 hours by bus from Maturin, a city in northeast Venezuela. After spending the night sleeping on the ground in Pacaraima, a dusty border town in the Amazon, they took another bus 130 miles (210 kilometers) to Boa Vista.   “We are desperate. We could no longer buy food,” said 33-year-old Montero, adding it had been months since Hector had any formula or diapers.   While in recent years millions of Venezuelans have immigrated, until recently Brazil received relatively few of them. Hundreds of thousands have gone to Colombia, but authorities there and elsewhere in South America are tightening their borders.   Portuguese-speaking Brazil has become the latest alternative for Venezuelans. But they are not finding much comfort there.   On a recent day, Militza DonQuis, 38, sat under a tree on the side of the main road in Pacaraima. In the two months since she and her husband arrived from Puerto Cabello, they have not been able to find work. With no money, they can’t take the bus to Boa Vista, so they sleep on the ground and scrounge for food during the day.   “This is horrible,” said DonQuis through tears, adding that in two months she had been unable to send money home to her children, ages 12 and 14, who she left with a sister.   With no money for a bus, Jose Guillen, 48, and wife July Bascelta, 44, decided to begin the journey to Boa Vista at night on foot, setting off with 9-year-old twins Angel and Ashley along a road surrounded by forest.   “God will provide,” said Guillen when asked how the family would eat during a trip that can take five days.   After walking 4 miles (6 kilometers), a Brazilian driver stopped agreed to give them a lift to Boa Vista, where the situation is arguably more desperate. Thousands of Venezuelans are living in the streets. They sleep in tents and on benches in central squares, have taken over abandoned buildings and cram dozens of people into small apartments.   The largest of three shelters in the city, Tancredo, has 700 people despite being equipped for 200. Half-naked children roam the former gymnasium while groups of men and women chat about their hopes for finding work and worry about the families they left in Venezuela.   Charlie Ivan Delgado, 30, said he came to Brazil several months ago with hopes of earning enough money so he and his high school sweetheart could finally afford a wedding. But each time he called home to El Tigre, he would hear the situation was getting worse, that their three children, ages 9, 5 and 1, were always hungry. So he decided to abandon wedding plans and bring his family.   “Kids in Venezuela today don’t think about playing with their friends or what they might study” in the university, said Delgado, sitting with his children and partner in a tent. “It’s more, ‘What am I going to eat today?”   While the shelter offers three meals a day, the family’s prospects are bleak.   The soccer referee has only been able to officiate a handful of games in rural areas outside Boa Vista, the kids are not in school and it’s hard to imagine how the family might leave the shelter.   “It’s like Tarzan being in New York,” said Delgado.   Brazilian authorities estimate 40,000 Venezuelans are living in Boa Vista, accounting for over 12 percent of the population in a city that was already poor and unable to offer many opportunities to its residents.   Most have arrived in the last several months, putting intense pressure on the public health system, the jails and volunteer organizations and churches that are carrying the largest burden when it comes to keeping Venezuelans fed.   Police say Venezuelans are sometimes working for as little as $7 a day in everything from construction to yard work, putting downward pressure on wages. For many, even offering to work for less isn’t enough: Several interviewed said many employers have told them flat out they won’t hire Venezuelans.   Milene da Souza, one of a group of volunteers who periodically serve food, said many Brazilians were increasingly angry at the situation.   “Brazil has many of its own problems,” she said. “Roraima has its own problems.”   Last month, fears of a backlash intensified when an arsonist set fire to two Boa Vista houses filled with Venezuelan immigrants, injuring dozens, several severely. A man originally from neighboring Guiana has been arrested, and police have said he was motivated by anger at Venezuelans in the city.   On the Plaza Simon Bolivar, named after the South American independence leader who was the inspiration for late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’ ”socialist revolution,” throngs are camping in tents or simply sleeping on the grass. When trucks pull up with food, hundreds run toward them, elbowing each other in a mad scramble to get a meal before they run out. Tempers flare as men accuse women and children of using their advantage to get extra portions.   Roraima’s governor has declared a state of emergency to free up funds for overwhelmed public hospitals, where health officials estimate that 8 in 10 patients are Venezuelan. Last month, President Michel Temer canceled activities during Carnival to make an emergency trip to Boa Vista.   But residents say the federal government’s plans, which include building a field hospital in Pacaraima and relocating a few thousand immigrants to bigger cities, are not enough. Between Jan. 1 and March 7 of this year, 27,755 Venezuelans crossed into Brazil from Pacaraima. Authorities estimate at least 80,000 are currently in Brazil, most of them in Roraima state.   Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation, has one of the region’s most inclusive immigration policies. Venezuelans are allowed to enter with just a national identification card, a lifeline for many who say that getting a passport in Venezuela has become impossible. Many immigrants who don’t have identification cards but can show a birth certificate are allowed in if they request and are granted refugee status.   Being designated “refugees” can be problematic because such immigrants can’t return to Venezuela; President Nicolas Maduro has called them “traitors” of the state.   Many say that as long as Maduro is in power they have no reason to return.   Despite skyrocketing inflation and a collapse of many businesses, Maduro has refused to allow humanitarian aid to enter Venezuela. He denies there is a crisis and says international relief would lead to foreign intervention.   “Maduro’s solution is that we just eat each other,” said Diana Merida sarcastically while washing her clothes in a Boa Vista river. The 34-year-old from Maturin said she recently sent $3 home to her 16-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son, which would allow them to buy some rice.   While it took her three days of selling coffee to earn that, it was more than she could earn in a month as a saleswoman in a clothes store back home.   On the Plaza Simon Bolivar, Kritce Montero sits with baby Hector, who now has on a diaper and has spent the last two days gobbling up formula, all donated by volunteers.   It’s been two days since the family crossed the border in Pacaraima. The first night they slept under a tree in the plaza, but then the second night somebody offered them a tent because of the baby.   “At least here, I’m able to feed my kids,” said Montero. “Even if I’m living under a bridge, I would feel OK if my kids have food.

Trump e a nova corrida nuclear - Washington Post Talking Points

Trump may be kicking off a new age of nuclear weapons

The Washington Post, Talking Points, October 11, 2017

Last week, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, a group that works to promote nuclear disarmament around the world.

Berit Reiss-Andersen of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said during the announcement that the group had been successful in “engaging people in the world who are scared of the fact that they are supposed to be protected by atomic weapons." But the award was not just for work already done: Reiss-Andersen said the prize was intended to be a "great encouragement" for ICAN and groups like it.

A story published by NBC News on Wednesday showed just how necessary that encouragement may be.

Officials told NBC that President Trump, during a July meeting about worldwide U.S. military operations, was shown a picture of how the country's nuclear weapons stockpile has declined since the 1960s. Trump then allegedly suggested he wanted a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal to return it to its highest point of over 30,000 weapons. Other officials in the room were taken aback by Trump's comments, according to NBC, and the meeting allegedly prompted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's now-infamous labeling of Trump as a "moron."

Ballistic missiles on display at Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 2001. (Michael Smith/Getty Images)

The president quickly denied making the request, calling it "pure fiction, made up to demean." But Trump's stance on nuclear weapons has long been murky.

On one hand, Trump has long recognized the threat of nuclear annihilation. In the 1980s, he worried about Libya and other rogue nations obtaining nuclear weapons, and even told The Post in 1984 that he wanted to help negotiate nuclear treaties with the Soviet Union. Just last year, he called nuclear proliferation "the single biggest problem we have."

Yet he's also said that the United States "must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability," allegedly asked advisers why he couldn't use nuclear weapons and seemingly suggested that other nations should consider having their own nuclear weapons. Worryingly, those other nations seem to have noticed.

Writing for The Post this week, former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan suggested it was now only a matter of time before South Korea and Japan developed their own nuclear weapons in response to the growing threat posed by North Korea's rapidly advancing nuclear program. "A six-way balance of mutually assured destruction — among the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and North Korea — will eventually be established in Northeast Asia," Kausikan argued.

At present, there appears to be little political will in either Seoul or Tokyo for this option. But polls show widespread public support for nuclear weapons among South Koreans, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is keen to boost his country's military power. And a future nuclear arms race may not be limited to East Asia. A number of experts have warned that if Trump scraps the Iran deal — and it looks increasingly likely that he will — it may lead to a scramble for nuclear arms in the Middle East.

"What we don't need is for that deal to be scuttled because Iran will then take steps to move in a direction of a nuclear program, and the states in the region will also take into account what they need to do, and it could lead to a nuclear arms race," said John Brennan, then the director of the CIA, during an interview with Circa last year.

The other big nuclear worry is in Russia — already a nuclear giant, with an estimated 7,000 nuclear warheads to the United States' 6,800. Russian President Vladimir Putin has spoken recently of the need to "strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces," while Trump reportedly denounced an Obama-era treaty that capped the number of nuclear weapons fielded by the two nations during a Februrary call with Putin. Some people, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, worry that Washington and Moscow may ultimately end up scrapping these agreements.

Much of the blame for this new era of nuclear uncertainty can be laid at the door of the American president. Trump is a man who is clearly fascinated by nuclear weapons and, as Mother Jones' David Corn writes, has frequently made comments that suggest "he believes a nuclear conflict is inevitable and perhaps destined for the near future."

At the same time, though, there are signs that he is spectacularly ignorant of the realities of the same nuclear weapons he obsesses over. Numerous proliferation experts have already chimed in to say that the increase in the number of nuclear warheads that he asked about would not only be counterproductive — it would be impossible.

Of course, not everything can be blamed upon Trump. Ultimately, the world's problems with nuclear proliferation predate him. Neither the United States nor its NATO allies were among the signatories to ICAN's Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The Obama administration was in fact a leading voice against this treaty, despite the former president's own hopeful rhetoric about a nuclear-free world.

But Trump is now the man with the nuclear codes, and ICAN's work has now become that much more urgent — a fact the group acknowledged when they spoke to The Post's Michael Birnbaum last week. "We do not have to accept this [risk]," said Beatrice Fihn, the Swedish executive director of ICAN. "We do not have to live with the kind of fear that Donald Trump could start a nuclear war that would destroy all of us. We should not base our security on whether or not his finger is on the trigger."

Zika virus: o terror da humanidade - enorme matéria do Washington Post

World

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2016/03/25/kim-conley-zika-virus-rio-olympics/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_evening

Zika’s terrifying path

By Marc Fisher, Joshua Partlow and Mary Jordan  

The Washington Post, March 25 at 1:13 PM

Kim Conley’s running career stems from a variety of formative experiences in Northern California’s Sonoma County, home to a long and distinguished distance running tradition. (Carlos Javier Ortiz for The Washington Post)

It’s Wednesday, so Kim Conley will run 11 miles, pretty much like any other day, except that on Wednesdays, she runs depleted — meaning she’s eaten exactly nothing. The idea is to be tough, reach down, push herself even harder than every other day.
She chews up the miles along the American River in Sacramento to keep shaving off seconds to keep getting closer to Rio. Conley, 30, has been running toward this summer’s Olympic Games for nearly a decade. But she’d also like to have a baby someday.
Two things stand between Conley and what could well be her last chance to win an Olympic medal. One is the clock, and she knows she can beat it. She’s lopped seconds off her time every year since she started running seriously. The other is a blood-sucking critter named Aedes, a globe-trotting mosquito with a world-class bite.

[Zika is the latest battle in a long war between humans and mosquitoes]

By the millions, Aedes skeeters are feeding on people who carry an unpredictable virus named Zika, then flitting over to their next victim, chomping down and spreading the disease. The bug’s bites have transmitted the virus to people in more than 20 countries: to pregnant mothers, with devastating consequences for their unborn children; to thousands of other people, who end up with fairly minor aches; and quite possibly this summer, to the best athletes in the world, gathered in one vulnerable place, wearing very little clothing.
The scramble to solve the Zika puzzle requires scientists to figure out exactly what threat a hardy breed of mosquitoes poses to people along the virus’s jagged journey. Crossing four continents since the first major outbreak nine years ago, Zika’s painful path now touches an Olympic runner in California, and before her a nurse from Indiana, pregnant women in Colombia, a misshapen infant in Brazil, immunologists in Bethesda, Md., all the way back to the owner of a souvenir shop on a tiny island in the South Pacific, 1,100 miles southeast of the Philippines. The hunt to understand Zika is a race to the very edge of science’s frontier, a race against the ticking clock of myriad pregnancies.

See the full graphic here. (Washington Post)

Conley’s passion and training push her to keep running toward Rio, even as a mounting clamor of warnings urge her to consider a detour. On a cool, sunny California morning at the cusp of spring, she can run straight ahead or look instead at the destruction and anxiety that Zika has caused, anguishing expectant mothers from Brazil up into the Caribbean and now even in the United States.
This is the story of Zika’s path so far, from its leading edge today back to its first appearance on a Pacific island in 2007. As the virus’s inexorable march brings it our way, scientists and governments are issuing a stream of strongly worded alerts. The chief of the federal bureaucracy in Washington this month urgently warned government employees to think twice about going to Brazil and other countries where the virus is rampant. The World Health Organization and the U.S. military put out similar warnings. But the U.S. Olympic Committee, buffeted between its desire to give elite athletes their moment  and its responsibility to protect competitors and their fans, has held back, issuing no guidance, announcing only that it will seek counsel from medical advisers.
Conley tries not to think about Zika. Her team — manager, agent, sports psychologist, physiologist, sponsor — is all about confidence: Rio or bust. Conley is a planner. She used to think in units of a school year. Then, preparing to run middle- and long-distance events in the London Olympics four years ago, she learned that elite athletes think in “quads,” four-year cycles leading to the next Games. After Conley failed to get past the qualifying heats in London, she’s spent this quad entirely focused on next steps, to Rio, then Tokyo in 2020, then maybe coaching, or becoming a physical therapist, or having a baby. Zika and pregnancy
Her husband and coach, Drew Wartenburg, thinks shorter term. He’s forever nudging Kim to live in the moment. “I call myself more an actor than a planner,” he says.

[The agonizing wait of an expectant mother with Zika: ‘Is my baby okay?’]

They haven’t talked much about kids, except that a baby would fit into their lives after Kim finishes running competitively. Then they started hearing about newborns in Brazil with heads that came out too small and pregnant women who felt compelled to consider abortions when they wanted to be preparing to raise a child.
Now, Conley and Wartenburg have to think about it. They’ve talked about whether Conley’s 28-year-old sister, already at the point where she wants a baby, should travel to Rio to watch Kim run. “She’s someone who probably shouldn’t go,” Conley says. “For us, we just have to wait.”
Zika keeps poking its head into their plans. Friends and neighbors keep asking about it. Family, too. “You want them to be excited about your Olympic journey,” Conley says, “and they’re mostly concerned about the Zika virus, and that’s too bad.”
Wartenburg the coach uses the virus as a motivator. “This is about confronting obstacles,” he says. “Part of what makes athletes elite is not letting any obstacle stand in your way.”
Conley glances over at him, eyebrow cocked. It’s not clear she’s buying this as a motivational tool.
Wartenburg the husband tries another tack. “You can’t have thousands of different athletes making thousands of different decisions about ‘Do I wrap myself in mosquito nets, or what?’ That’s not a burden I want. We just have to trust that someone will assess the risk and that their thinking will trickle down to us.”
Conley is quiet. When she speaks, it’s in a small voice: “No one’s said, ‘Don’t go.’ ”

Two things stand between Conley and what could well be her last chance to win an Olympic medal. One is the clock, and she knows she can beat it. The other is a blood-sucking critter named Aedes, a globe-trotting mosquito with a world-class bite. (Photo by Carlos Javier Ortiz for The Washington Post)

January 2016: A scary mask

Barbara Ihrke went with plenty of mosquito repellent. When Ihrke, a 61-year-old nurse, decided to travel from Indiana to Haiti in January to teach a seminar in transcultural nursing, she’d heard a bit about Zika but hadn’t paid much attention to the news from Brazil.
Despite slathering herself with repellent, Ihrke got a few bites. She thought nothing of it. She came home in late January, feeling fine.
Then, on her fifth day back in Marion, Ind., she got a low-grade headache. She felt tired, her joints swelled up, and a rash spread over much of her body, including, for a couple of days, on her face.
Zika, it turned out, was already in the Caribbean, and people such as Ihrke were bringing it home with them. Enough cases had popped up in Haiti that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called the island nation a place of extreme concern.

[Want to avoid Zika? Stay more than a mile above sea level, CDC says]

Two days after her symptoms hit, Ihrke, who works as vice president of academic affairs at Indiana Wesleyan University’s nursing school, called her school’s health center and said, “I think I have Zika.” She was matter-of-fact. Trained in tropical medicine, she reacted more calmly than a layman might have.
By the time she got to the clinic an hour later, the staff had printed out fact sheets from the CDC on Zika. Tests showed her white-blood-cell count had dropped by half. She stayed home that weekend and went to work the next Monday wearing a mask — not because she was putting anyone else at risk of infection, but for her own protection, because of her low blood count. What can be done to prevent Zika?
As casually as Ihrke reacted to the virus, those around her were more alarmed, especially during the eight days when she wore the mask. “People took a step back when they saw it,” she says.
When one man pulled away and announced that his wife was pregnant, Ihrke set him straight: “I can’t give this to you, and there are no mosquitoes in Indiana in February.”
That assurance wasn’t enough for some people. Ihrke can’t guarantee that the virus isn’t still active in her bloodstream, and some neighbors have told her they’re afraid to get too close.
Still, Ihrke felt it was important to identify herself as Indiana’s first Zika case, even though state health officials had assured her they’d keep her identity secret. “Part of my calling is to help us react to illnesses, so I decided I should self-identify because I have the ability to explain,” she says.
Ihrke’s professional detachment lets her see that for most victims, Zika is no big deal. Having lived and worked in Africa, she says, “knowing that thousands of people die every day from malaria and now seeing that we’re spending millions of dollars on Zika, well, at times we in the U.S. are not rational about what we decide is scariest. We’ve gone into the Ebola mentality, which is that the sky is falling. We invested so much money in making everybody in America Ebola-prepared, and for what, maybe 10 cases in the U.S.? In a year or two, we’ll hardly remember Zika.”
Less than two weeks after she first felt ill, Ihrke got the all-clear, a call from the health center telling her that her blood count was back to normal.
She’s ready to return to Haiti, proposing to study the incidence of birth defects there in the coming year. But she knows heading into Zika’s lair is not the right choice for some people. “For the Olympic athletes, it’s hard,” Ihrke says. “Anyone who wanted to be pregnant, I’d say, ‘Are you certain this is what you want to do?’ ”

Darley Martinez Cabarcas, 17, stands for a portrait at Fundación Juan Felipe Gómez Escobar, where she receives regular checkups for her pregnancy in Cartagena on Feb. 19. (Dania Maxwell for the Washington Post)

November 2015: ‘I was five months pregnant’

Two Colombian teenagers, both eight months pregnant, stand outside a health clinic in Cartagena, waiting to know what Zika has done to their babies.
“You got it, too?” Yisleth Luna Cardenas, 18, asks Darley Martinez Cabarcas, who is 17.
“When I was five months pregnant,” Darley says, recalling the headaches and fever she had in November. “I see the news. I see the babies being born with big problems. Aren’t you worried?”
Yisleth dealt with Zika anxiety by focusing not on possible birth defects, but on delivering her first baby: “Will it be a Caesarean section? How painful will the labor be?”
Darley cracks a smile, enjoying a rare shared moment in what she calls the “solitude of being pregnant with Zika.”
“I know everyone is worried — men, too — but so much falls to the women,” she says. “We carry the babies, and then we will raise the babies.” A pause. “My boyfriend wanted me to abort.”
A Catholic, Darley says it is wrong to have an abortion. She is no longer in touch with the baby’s father.
Now, in March, she waits. She knows the virus has been linked to severe birth defects, including microcephaly, the interrupted development of the skull that leads to abnormally small heads and brain damage. The virus has been active in Colombia long enough to have infected thousands of pregnant women, but not yet long enough to reveal whether the defects that have become rampant in Brazil will happen here. What is microcephaly?
Zika’s aches subside quickly; the real pain sets in when the women are strong enough to start worrying about what the virus may have done to the baby inside them. “It’s a lonely time,” Darley says. Being pregnant with Zika is not something you can talk to your mother about, because it’s so new. “I can’t wait to have the baby in my arms, to see with my own eyes that he is okay.”
At the Juan Felipe Gomez Escobar Foundation, a nonprofit serving low-income, teenage mothers, Darley and Yisleth attend job skill classes and get sonograms.
The scans show no sign of microcephaly. But the doctors also say that developmental and neurological problems linked to Zika might not show up on a scan.
Darley goes home to wait with her mother, sister and grandmother — her father no longer lives with the family. “Women have it hard,” she says.

Rozilene Ferreira de Mesquita kisses her son, Arthur Ferreira da Conceicao as she poses for a portrait at Hospital das Clinicas da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco on March 14 in Recife, Brazil. (Matt McClain/ The Washington Post)

October 2015: A tiny skull

While Darley and Yisleth wait, Zika’s impact is already clear 3,000 miles to the southeast, where a mother and a physical therapist try to soothe an agitated, bent baby boy named Arthur. The therapist places Arthur face-down on a yellow exercise ball. He immediately begins to cry. The way his 5-month-old body is shaped, shoulders hunched, arms and legs perpetually bent and clenched — typical for microcephalic babies — doing anything on his stomach feels uncomfortable.
The therapist rubs his back while his mother, Rozilene Ferreira de Mesquita, puts a pacifier in his mouth.
“Calm down,” she whispers.
Arthur has appointments lined up for visual testing, motor-skill development and auditory stimulation at the Altino Ventura Foundation hospital in the Brazilian city of Recife. On Thursdays, dozens of mothers of babies with abnormally small heads gather here for therapy sessions, group talks and one-month birthday celebrations. Of 6,671 suspected microcephaly cases in Brazil, 1,819 of them are in this state, Pernambuco, the highest proportion in the country.
Recife, the ‘ground zero’ of the zika virus
Thousands of parents now spend their days visiting doctors who X-ray, scan, probe, bend and measure their babies to try to understand what Zika has done. Just three days into March, de Mesquita has already filled a piece of notebook paper with 25 doctors’ visits Arthur must make at eight hospitals over the course of the month.
She refuses to miss an appointment. Once her maternity leave ended, she resorted to doctors’ notes to explain her absence from work. She expects to lose her job. Then the family will subsist on her husband’s minimum-wage salary of $220 per month.
“I work for my son now,” she says. “My son is my boss, and he’s a picky boss.”
De Mesquita, 39, contracted Zika last March, the second month of her pregnancy, after a mosquito-swarmed Friday on the beach in Suape, a town south of Recife where her husband worked as a hotel security guard.

See the full graphic here. (Washington Post)

The next weekend, she woke feeling achy, with a rash on her arms and torso, and an infuriating itch. Recife was not yet known as the epicenter of a hemisphere-wide outbreak. There were as yet no billboards along the highways warning about microcephaly. In the hallways of the state health ministry, where de Mesquita worked as a cleaner, she’d never heard the name Zika.
She went to her neighborhood clinic, already packed with people with the same symptoms. Doctors treated her for an allergic reaction, which didn’t help, then tested her for dengue fever and rubella.
“I was so happy when they came out negative,” she says. “But it turned out that this was worse.”
Arthur Ferreira da Conceicao was born on Oct. 1 after a relatively painless two hours of labor, far easier than her first son, 15 years earlier. But Arthur’s body felt cold, and his skull was tiny, just 11 inches in circumference. The forehead was foreshortened. The back of his head was flat, with wrinkled skin. Within minutes, a doctor informed her there was a problem: Arthur had microcephaly. De Mesquita hadn’t heard the term.
“It’s weird, “ the doctor told her, “we already have seven other babies at the hospital with that right now.”

[Zika: More than 2,500 babies born with microcephaly in Brazil, WHO predicts]

Arthur couldn’t leave the hospital for 27 days. As he has grown, his problems have deepened. His body seems frozen in a rictus of tension.
His mother writes lists of questions for the doctors: Can he see or hear? Will he ever walk, talk, read, go to school? The answers are always the same: “I don’t know.”
In her small concrete house in a hillside slum, de Mesquita has filled Arthur’s crib with toys the therapists recommend. She built a rattle out of a water bottle filled with black beans, to test his hearing. She made a paddle with black and white stripes that she shines with a flashlight to encourage visual perception. On the wall of Arthur’s room, bug repellent mists from a plug-in dispenser.
To get to their first appointment, de Mesquita wakes at 4 a.m., tidies up, does the laundry, and feeds Arthur. She kisses her husband goodbye and walks into a warm, drizzling morning as insects trill and roosters crow. She is resigned to another trying commute.

Rozilene Ferreira de Mesquita, center, holds her son, Arthur Ferreira da Conceicao as she listens to a doctor during a visit to Hospital das Clinicas da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco for Arthur on March 14 Recife, Brazil. (Matt McClain/ The Washington Post)

“People are always staring,” de Mesquita says. “I know people are thinking, ‘What a small head. They’re not thinking, ‘Oh, that baby’s beautiful.’ ”
She transfers from the bus to a packed subway car. Passengers crowded around her stare at Arthur. A woman in a yellow tank top speaks loudly to de Mesquita, and others turn to look: “Did you have Zika? You had that thing?”
De Mesquita ignores the passengers and tries to soothe Arthur, who is sobbing, heaving, his face contorted in anguish.
“Calma,” she says, rubbing his head.
Her days unspool in waiting rooms on rows of hard plastic chairs bolted in place. Her hours slip by in a numbing drift of chitchat with other microcephaly moms. The moms started a WhatsApp group — more than 120 women strong — to share child-care tips for microcephaly kids.

[Poor Brazilian mothers join hands, turn to social media amid microcephaly crisis]

De Mesquita arrives at 6:45 a.m. at this morning’s hospital, the Association for the Assistance of Children with Deficiencies. She takes a number, 300, and waits for a doctor, who undresses Arthur, claps next to each ear, blows on his eyes, testing his sensations. Arthur’s body at rest is clenched and rigid, his hands in fists, his legs crossed. As the doctor pulls Arthur’s shoulders back, stretching his chest, the baby screams.
“Don’t cry,” de Mesquita whispers.
Five hours later, she walks back to the bus station and opens her umbrella to protect Arthur from the blazing sun.
A woman comes up to de Mesquita. “Jesus only gives children like this to people who are really strong, who are warriors,” the woman says. “You have the capacity to care for him. Someone without faith can’t do it, but you have faith.”
De Mesquita stands up, hefting Arthur onto her hip.
“That’s my bus,” she says.

Inside a lab where researchers are racing to diagnose Zika

Play Video1:50

As the Zika virus continues to spread, scientists in Recife, Brazil, are searching for a quicker, less expensive test to detect the virus. (Whitney Leaming,Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

July 2015: A new mystery

Wing-Pui Kong opens a white mini-freezer, the size found in many a dorm room, and slides out a box labeled “Zik V DNA Vaccine.” He lifts the cover and removes one of about a dozen tiny vials of DNA plasmas that he and his colleagues at the Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, Md., have synthesized to see if they can prompt cells to protect against the Zika virus. Countries that have the Zika virus
“Time is important,” Kong says. “When you see the pictures of the babies. . . . ” He stops himself. “I don’t really want to look at those pictures. I can’t imagine being those parents.”
Ever since last July, when a Brazilian physician pulled aside one of the Vaccine Research Center’s top scientists at a conference in Rockville, warning him about a disturbing, rampant virus, Kong’s lab on the campus of the National Institutes of Health has been transformed into an anti-Zika war room. Rows of scientists painstakingly design and test dozens of different sequences of DNA, searching for those that might prompt creation of the perfect protein.
Around the country, scientists are studying cells isolated from people recovering from Zika. They need to learn how the virus works on people, why symptoms show up as they have, and how to make the human body defend itself. The goal is a vaccine, produced in the millions of doses, to be given to young children, ideally a one-time, lifelong immunization.
On the fourth floor of the Vaccine Research Center, created 16 years ago to develop protection against HIV, the best candidates for a vaccine will be injected into lab mice to see if they become immunized.
“The first round of mouse immunizations have not been the best,” says Barney Graham, the virologist who runs the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory. “So we continue. Every week, there’s another mouse experiment.”
At the moment, the freezer contains 29 bacterial recipes. The goal is to begin testing vaccines this fall.

[Zika has been linked to birth defects. Now it may be causing paralysis.]

In lab after lab in their modern glass-and-concrete building, people who’d been working on HIV, Middle East respiratory syndrome or flu vaccines have shifted gears and launched a full-on drive against Zika. They still think mostly in timelines composed of years and decades, but that’s changing. In the past eight years, thanks mainly to research conducted toward an HIV vaccine, the process has sped up as researchers map the atomic structures of a virus and identify antibodies that lead toward a vaccine. Starting in 2003, it took 20 months to develop a vaccine to be tested against SARS. When avian flu hit a couple of years later, the process was slimmed down to 11 months. And in 2009’s H5N1 virus outbreak, the lab got its development work done in four months.
If all goes well in Bethesda, a vaccine could be ready for distribution in 2018.
“We’re always in a hurry here,” Graham says. “We’re still in a hurry on HIV even though it’s been 15 years. But we’re seeing more and more of these emerging, disruptive viruses now — it’s a sign of changes in ecology, as the ecosystems change from climate shifts or increased mobility.”
Last July, two years after a big outbreak of chikungunya virus in South America, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases held a conference in Rockville on “Gaps and Opportunities in Chikungunya Research.” In a hallway during a break, a physician from Brazil, Roberto Jose da Silva Badaro, made it his business to find Graham. Chikungunya was indeed rampant and troublesome, Badaro said, but something new had cropped up in his region. Chikungunya and dengue fever in Brazil

Dr. Barney Graham, Deputy Director, Vaccine Research Center Chief, Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory and Translational Science Core, is leading a lab that is investigating a Zika DNA vaccine candidate for the virus at the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center on the campus of National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. (Jared Soares for The Washington Post)

All spring, patients in Bahia and neighboring Brazilian states had been coming down with rash and mild fever, but the symptoms were not quite the same as those from other mosquito-borne viruses. Brazilian doctors wondered if they were seeing measles, rubella, West Nile, Mayaro virus or an adverse reaction to some vaccine.
By late spring, the number of Zika cases in Bahia was tripling every week. At neighborhood clinics, people waited for hours to see a doctor.
A medical team led by a virologist at the Federal University of Bahia, Gubio Soares, isolated the Zika virus. They rushed to tell authorities, including Badaro, Bahia’s vice minister of health.
Over the summer, doctors began to see a spike in Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition marked by temporary paralysis. In the second half of last year, the state recorded nearly 140 cases, seven times higher than normal. Hospitals scrambled to find enough intensive-care beds for all the patients.
“It was a war,” Badaro says.
The battle continues: Some pregnant women have left Brazil, heading for colder climates in Europe and the United States. Women have sought out illicit abortions, illegal in Brazil under almost all circumstances. Vendors in a downtown Rio market said Cytotec, a banned medication for stomach ulcers, is in high demand for home abortions. Some pregnant women choose to become virtual prisoners, refusing to leave home except for emergencies.
“You guys are discussing something that’s really in the past,” Badaro told U.S. researchers. “What’s coming is the Zika virus.”
Bahia, he told them, had already seen 63,000 Zika cases.
Graham had heard of Zika — he knew it had been discovered in Africa in the 1940s, and that there’d been an outbreak in the South Pacific a few years ago, but he’d not heard of it causing alarming symptoms.
Graham and his colleagues soon started grabbing researchers off other projects.
“When we see a virus spreading like that, we take notice,” Graham says. “People like Dr. Badaro are the sentinel. He was looking for chikungunya, and he found Zika.”

Dr. Wei Shin sequences DNA as part of an investigation for a Zika vaccine candidate at the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda. (Jared Soares for The Washington Post)

Spring 2007: A spreading rash

For hours each night, the “nonstop Micronesian beat” of V6AI, the only radio station in the island nation of Yap, transmits an endless loop of public service announcements warning residents to “sleep under insecticide-treated bed nets” and empty open containers where mosquitoes might breed.
Mosquito bites used to be just a nuisance, a small price to pay for living in South Pacific paradise. But in 2007, Zika hit Yap with a powerhouse punch — an alien virus zapping an isolated population in a place with few defenses against the bug.
But in little more than a year after it first hit Yap in spring of 2007, Zika — named after the forest in Uganda where the virus was discovered in 1947 — infected about 7,000 of the island’s 11,000 residents. Most people had mild symptoms or none at all. Doctors thought they were seeing dengue, but the symptoms weren’t quite right. They called in tropical-disease experts from the CDC and WHO. Lab tests determined the culprit: Zika.
“We probably didn’t pick it up till the third or fourth week,” says James Edilyong, a Yap native who is chief of staff at Yap State Hospital. People streamed into the hospital, but “really, we had nothing we could do for them.”
Andy Choor, 32, thought he had a cold, maybe a light flu. His temperature flared, his appetite waned. Everywhere around him, “people were going down. You almost knew who had it because they were down for three or four days, and you just didn’t see them,” he recalls.
Choor, who owns a souvenir and crafts shop, felt Zika’s impact at the cash register: Tourists — lifeblood of the island’s economy — became scarce. Life on the island changed. People who had never really cared about bug bites were now staying inside more. Things seemed quieter, more subdued.
“It was alarming, and people are still concerned,” he says, even though the virus has largely vanished from the island.

[How a tiny mosquito became one of the world’s ‘most efficient killers’]

Edilyong, 48, was among the first in Yap to get Zika. “I’ve had the privilege to have both Zika and dengue, and dengue was much worse,” he says. His Zika rash lasted only a few hours; the aches resolved themselves within a day.
From Yap, Zika made its way 5,000 miles east to French Polynesia in 2013 and on to Japan the next year.
After so many microcephalic babies were born in Brazil, doctors in the Pacific islands went back to see if they had missed a spike in birth defects. The results are inconclusive — in Polynesia, there had been an unusual number of malformations of the central nervous system in babies and miscarried fetuses, but the numbers were not large enough to cause alarm, and a connection to Zika remains unproven.
Yap saw no such cluster of defects, Edilyong says: “Whatever happened to Zika to cause the defects in Brazil hadn’t happened when the virus was active here.”
In Yap and Polynesia, Zika seemed to burn through in less than a year. No cases have been reported since the outbreak faded, doctors said.
How human-made environmental factors help spread Zika and other diseases
The fear hasn’t gone away, but the hope that life can be normal again has returned. “We never had a panic about it,” Edilyong says. “But people became more anxious after other countries got the outbreak, after we heard about the birth defects. We get the word out about what to do, how to help prevent the spread. We talk to the chiefs, and the message goes right to the villages. And we get people to clean up their yards and empty water containers. We’re okay, we watch out for each other.”

March 2016: Race against risk

Kim Conley runs to get to Rio. She runs for the satisfaction of knowing that she’s given it her all. “Really, it’s for the afterglow,” she says, “the feeling of the effort.”
She feels a fire, a will that is evident in her steely blue eyes, her zest for the daily punishment she endures, and now in her willingness to take a chance. Until someone in authority tells her otherwise, she’s determined to outrun the danger. She has to believe she can beat an opponent named Zika.
Fisher reported from Sacramento and Washington; Partlow from Brazil; and Jordan from Colombia. Julie Tate in Washington and Anna Kaiser in Brazil contributed to this report.
Read more stories about the Zika virus: 
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Venezuela faces ‘worst-case scenario’ as Zika outbreak expands
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Why Zika is ‘much more insidious, cunning and evil’ than Ebola
Read our full coverage on the Zika virus

Marc Fisher, a senior editor, writes about most anything. He’s been The Post’s enterprise editor, local columnist and Berlin bureau chief, and he’s covered politics, education, pop culture, and much else in three decades on the Metro, Style, National and Foreign desks.

Joshua Partlow is The Post’s bureau chief in Mexico. He has served previously as the bureau chief in Kabul and as a correspondent in Brazil and Iraq.

Mary Jordan is a national correspondent for the Washington Post covering the 2016 presidential campaign. She served as the co-bureau chief of the Post’s London, Mexico and Tokyo bureaus, and was the head of content of Washington Post Live, which organizes forums and debates.