The <i>Zika case</i> : Defining, counting, modelling and making a health emergency visible

Health emergencies are not self-evident issues. They need to be constructed as emergencies through a domestication process to put them in an epidemiological, bureaucratic and sanitary frame. To understand this process, the author presents the example of a Brazilian virus epidemic and all the endeavours to turn Zika-related microcephaly into a health emergency. The author discusses the practices of defining, counting and modelling the Zika case as a unit of epidemiological analysis. To do this, the author engages in an ethnography of documents, analysing the Brazilian Ministry of Health protocols published between 2015 and 2016 to understand how the Zika case was constructed through defining and counting practices. Selected scientific articles published during 2016 are also analysed in order to show how modelling demonstrated the causal link between the Zika virus and microcephaly to have been a universal phenomenon and not a Brazilian specificity. Through mathematical and epidemiological models, the Brazilian Zika case gained legitimacy as a complex and alarming phenomenon. By analysing this process, the aim is to understand how the language of mathematical-epidemiological modelling of the Zika case produces regimes of visibility that, while making the teratogenicity of the Zika virus visible, simultaneously conceals essential issues for a broader understanding of the epidemic's health and social effects in the Brazilian context.