Teams of U.S. and Brazilian health workers ventured into dicey slums, fought through snarled traffic and braved torrential downpours on the first day of their effort to determine if the Zika virus is causing babies to be born with a birth defect affecting the brain.
The eight teams, each made up of one “disease detective” from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and three Brazilian health workers, went to work Tuesday in Paraiba, the impoverished state in northeastern Brazil that is one of the epicenters of the country’s tandem outbreaks of Zika and microcephaly.
The study aims to determine if the Brazilian government is right that Zika can cause microcephaly, or whether the mosquito-borne virus is not in fact to blame or is only partially responsible, as a growing chorus of doctors in Brazil and beyond have begun to suggest.
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