Camaçari, Brazil: Camacari was in chaos, its hospitals overflowing with sick people desperate to know what was happening to them, never suspecting theirs would be the first confirmed cases of Zika in Brazil.
In the city where the virus made its explosive debut in early 2015, anxious residents asked themselves: Was it dengue? An allergic reaction to contaminated water?
The "mysterious" disease, people called it, while medical reports referred to it as "undetermined eczematous syndrome," noting the skin irritation associated with it.
"My two children and I got sick. In my neighborhood, nearly everybody became infected," said Vanessa Machado dos Santos, who makes a living selling coconut water in this torrid city, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Salvador in the northeastern state of Bahia.
"Our skin began to itch, we had fever, headaches and body aches, a lot of pain in our joints," she told AFP.
Sometime later, the 35-year-old was told that what she was feeling was caused by the Zika virus, but she still had her doubts.
"Nobody knew much about it -- that it was like dengue, that it was carried by mosquitos, that it came from another country. We heard a lot of stories about the famous Zika," she said.
"Was I scared? Of course! We didn't know what was coming next. You are always afraid of the unknown."
AFP
