Ilana Löwy, <i>Viruses and Reproductive Injustice: Zika in Brazil</i> Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024. Pp. 296. ISBN 978-1-4214-4791-9. $59.95 (paperback).

Epidemiology cannot end stories of disease.They do not conclude when the graphs decline; nor do they remain confined to public-health domains.They often continue to shape the formation of social relations and identities.People continue to live with social impacts, as is evident in the COVID-19 pandemic.Although most of society now regards it as past, it persists in mourning, in interrupted lives and in bodies still seeking recognition for the persistent, disabling symptoms of long COVID.The same goes for chikungunya, Zika and other diseases whose social traces far exceed the clinical timeline of infection.Ilana Lwy upends traditional epidemiological analysis and shifts focus: from infection to women's bodies, from biomedicine to reproductive rights, from vector to social structure.The book proposes to go beyond the patriarchy of epidemics -that is, to break with a model that naturalizes motherhood, silences women and frames public-health events within narratives of sacrifice and compulsory care.By using the Zika epidemic as exemplary of reproductive injustice, Lwy shows how the Brazilian state simultaneously lionized mothers of children born with microcephaly and reinforced control over their bodies.This contradiction becomes acuter in a context of the growing influence of conservative religious sectors, which moralize reproduction and openly advocate for the criminalization of abortion.The 2015-16 Zika epidemic was largely framed as a typical public-health crisis: a matter of viruses, mosquito vectors and technical control strategies.Images of babies with microcephaly mobilized public opinion, urgent biomedical research, emergency responses to Aedes aegypti and government actions focused on childcare.However, historians and anthropologists of health have highlighted less visible -in many cases deliberately silenced -dimensions of epidemics, raising deeper issues of gender, reproductive rights and inequality.Lwy challenges the dominant epidemiological emphasis on infectious agents and vectors, focusing instead on women's bodies -particularly those of those most vulnerable -on which the epidemic's deepest marks are inscribed.Lwy, a long-time visiting researcher in Brazil, is deeply familiar with the country's entangled histories of mosquitoes and inequality.She reveals crisis dimensions that were largely neglected: unequal access to health care, the limits of reproductive planning, the criminalization of abortion and the persistence of patriarchal models that naturalize motherhood as women's moral destiny.Not just a public-health emergency, the Zika epidemic was a moral and political crisis, marked by disputes over who could to decide whether to bring to term a child with concrete risk of a severe disability.Yet public discourse avoided this debate.Pregnant women were