Mônica Bergamo: Debora Diniz will return to Brazil to study zika: ‘My place is there’

Anthropologist Debora Diniz will return to Brazil after a self-exile that began four years ago. Her return will be motivated by a research that will investigate the lives of women and children affected by the zika virus – and which has just received a contribution of about R$ 40 million.

This week, a consortium of researchers of which Diniz is a member was awarded the Discovery Awards (discovery awards, in free translation), offered by the charitable organization Wellcome Trust. The funding is considered one of the largest in the world for health and biomedicine.

The research, which will be carried out simultaneously in territories such as Brazil, the United Kingdom, Sierra Leone and Hong Kong, will analyze what happens to a population after the end of a global emergency is declared, as was the case with Ebola.

In the Brazilian case, people who live with sequelae of the zika virus and families who care for children who have become infected will be monitored.

“I’m going back to hear firsthand how these women are doing and do what I know best, which is to be part of a process of social transformation through scientific research, as a form of witness and care”, says Diniz to the column.

“This, for me, has a very special symbolism that I belong there. [no Brasil]. And my place is not only with myself, but with all the people who are fighting for their rights”, he says.

Professor at UnB (University of Brasília) and currently visiting researcher at Brown University, in Rhode Island, United States, Debora Diniz is one of the most awarded Brazilian researchers in the areas of gender and reproductive rights.

It was for defending that abortion should be treated as a public health problem that, in 2018, he began to receive death threats and had to leave Brazil.

When celebrating the award by the Wellcome Trust, she highlights that funding of this magnitude is not common for the field of social sciences and for a line of research like this for the health area.

“This is a story that has to be told not just because Zika continues to circulate, but because after the end there is a story to be told by women, affected families and children. Is it over there.

The idea is that the study explores the impacts that occur in the design of public policies when the end of an epidemic and a pandemic is declared. The results should guide the formulation of responses to new health emergencies.

“The end does not mean the disappearance of specific protection needs for that population, on the contrary. The end is a language, for example, from the World Health Organization”, explains the anthropologist.

_{with BIANKA VIEIRA, KARINA MATIAS and MANOELLA SMITH}