Free Zika by Donald G. McNeil

it was discovered in 1947 (although a new fight could eventually arise over that if genetic sequencing shows disease-altering changes, such as a mutation that made it more lethal). Declaring a pandemic would probably not have changed anything for the United States, but some countries have response mechanisms that are triggered by it.
    Thankfully, no one asked the WHO to referee a fight over the name “Zika.” As with “Sin Nombre virus,” naming conventions had created a nightmare in the 2009 flu pandemic. That novel influenza virus had first been spotted in a pig-farming town named La Gloria in Mexico’s state of Veracruz. (Which was unusual because, historically, new flus were first detected in Hong Kong, and it was assumed that they originated on the pig and poultry farms of southern China.)
    Flus have been around forever, but they become “novel” easily because they have eight loosely connected genes that can be readily swapped between viral strains in a game of mix ’n’ match. The new mix had two pig genes and arose in a piggery, so it was called a “swine flu” even though it was by then a human one, too. At that point the pork industry howled, saying the name was killing bacon sales. The name also sparked a crisis in Egypt, where the government slaughtered 300,000 pigs belonging to the Coptic Christian minority. It was religious prejudice, not public health; Egypt didn’t have a single case of the flu then. It also had unforeseen consequences, since the Copts collected Cairo’s garbage to feed their pigs.
    Bending to pressure, the WHO stopped saying “swine flu.” There was a long history of naming flus after their supposed places of origin—the Hong Kong flu, the Asian flu, the Russian flu, the Spanish flu. But a PAHO official strongly objected to “Mexican flu” or “Veracruz flu,” or even “La Gloria flu,” claiming that any place-name would demonize people from that place. Maddeningly, the WHO kept changing its institutional mind. First, it called the new flu just “H1N1,” but that was confusing, because there is a seasonal H1N1. Then it was “A (H1N1) S-O.I.V.” for type A (H1N1) swine-origin influenza virus. But headline writers and television anchors refused to touch that. Finally, it became “Pandemic (H1N1) 2009.” But just calling it the 2009 swine flu has stuck.
    The WHO emergency merely raised the appetite for stories.My colleague Catherine Saint Louis did one about microcephaly and its consequences for children, explaining that some were profoundly disabled, while some were called “microcephalic” but simply had small heads and were of normal or near-normal intelligence.The BBC did twinned profiles of two British boys close in age to each other. One could run and kick a soccer ball clumsily but could not speak words and had emotional struggles. The other had a smallish head and complained that it ached, as if his skull wasn’t big enough for his brain. But he was articulate and apparently doing well in school.
    French Polynesian scientists and colleagues in France released an important paper in the Lancet , a British medical journal. After reading the headlines about babies with microcephaly in Brazil, they had begun a hunt through the island’s records of births and medical abortions after their Zika outbreak. They had found 19 cases of congenital abnormalities, including 8 of microcephaly, 7 of them in a tight cluster of pregnancies that had begun during four months when the epidemic was peaking.
    My colleague Sabrina Tavernise interviewed Brazilian doctors about their first recollections,and did a story about mosquito control and how hard it was to kill Aedes aegypti because it bred and lived indoors with its victims, as cockroaches do, not off in the swamps, as some other species did.
    From Brazil, Simon did one describing the tremendous surge the country had had in