Project DZC (Decode Zika and Covid) is an initiative to study the impact of back-to-back novel infectious diseases on women’s reproductive health and infant well-being.
The main goal is to uncover the immediate and long-term effects of novel infectious disease crisis on women’s reproductive health, fertility, and health disparities, with a focus on successive epidemics. In a large diverse country with acute disparities, the study explores how women’s individual and contextual experiences and “scars” from their experiences with past epidemics have influenced their reproductive lives before, during and beyond the Covid pandemic.
DZC’s intensive data collection has been following a panel of 4,000 women in Pernambuco, Brazil. These women have now spent several of their reproductive years in back-to-back novel infectious disease crises—the Zika epidemic of 2015-2017 and the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.
With the prediction of an “era of pandemics” characterized by the recurring emergence of novel diseases and the risk of pandemics, DZC offers critical insights into the lasting, interconnected consequences of consecutive novel infectious disease crises on some of the most vulnerable populations, even when the disease contexts differ, with implications that extend beyond Brazil.
This project is funded by The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health, ID 2R01HD091257.