ABSTRACT
The World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and other global public health agencies announced that Zika virus transmission was widespread in all of Central America, much of South America, and many countries in the Caribbean, and that these countries should be avoided “until more is known about the virus.” This chapter deals with tracing the emerging science of Zika as it manifested itself, both in the scientific and political world, between 2016 and 2018. Counting Zika has relied on a hierarchy of evidence and related terminology. In countries where exposure is presumed and laboratory testing is unavailable, case definition criteria suffice to count a “suspected” case. The invisibilities and partialities inherent to counting Zika in the world, socially and scientifically, have also influenced the burgeoning field of Zika modeling, albeit in different ways and with different results. As of 2018, around 3,000 cases of Zika-related microcephaly have been reported from 29 countries since its initial appearance in Brazil.
