Author: 

Donald G. Mcneill Jr.

IN AUGUST 2015, something strange began happening in the maternity wards of Recife, a seaside city perched on the northeastern tip of Brazil where it juts out into the Atlantic.

“Doctors, pediatricians, neurologists, they started finding this thing we had never seen,” said Dr. Celina M. Turchi, an infectious diseases specialist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil’s most famous scientific research institute.

“Children with normal faces up to the eyebrows, and then you have no foreheads,” she continued. “The doctors were saying, ‘Well, I saw four today,’ and ‘Oh, that’s strange, because I saw two.’” Some of the children seemed to breastfeed well and did not seem to be ill, she said.

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