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Record W4408257660 · doi:10.1093/shm/hkaf017

Ilana Löwy, <i>Viruses and Reproductive Injustice: Zika in Brazil</i>

2025· article· en· W4408257660 on OpenAlexaff
Carlos Haag

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial History of Medicine · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDemographic Trends and Gender Preferences
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsZika virusInjusticeVirologyGeographyMedicinePolitical scienceLawVirus

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In 1822, French botanist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire warned, ‘Either Brazil annihilates the leaf-cutting ants, or the leaf-cutting ants will annihilate Brazil’. Two centuries later, his remark about how small creatures could challenge such a vast country resonates anew, this time with mosquitoes. In ‘Viruses and Reproductive Injustice: Zika in Brazil’, the French historian of medicine, Illana Löwy, unpacks how the tiny Aedes aegypti mosquito has exposed the fragility of public health systems and the profound inequalities woven into Brazil’s social fabric. Löwy’s account highlights that the 2015 Zika outbreak in northeastern Brazil was not merely a public health crisis; it also revealed deep-seated social inequalities within the country. The most affected were poor, rural, non-White women who faced inadequate healthcare and limited reproductive rights. Contrary to earlier assumptions, researchers later found that the Zika virus, initially seen as harmless, was linked to a significant congenital disorder known as the ‘microcephaly epidemic’. Further epidemiological studies confirmed that infants born to mothers who contracted the virus during pregnancy typically had a head circumference of 32 cm or smaller, indicating congenital Zika syndrome (CZS), which could lead to potential neurological and cognitive disabilities. This situation created considerable challenges for the mothers known as Mães de Micro (‘micros mothers’). These women already faced heightened vulnerabilities due to their socio-economic conditions, experiencing increased exposure to mosquitoes and encountering barriers to effective contraception and reliable prenatal care. Moreover, they were excluded from the decriminalisation of abortion in cases of foetal abnormalities.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.220
Threshold uncertainty score0.437

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.051
GPT teacher head0.362
Teacher spread0.311 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractno

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