ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses various corners of global health that are all too often invisible to the end products of science but so essential to their success and inner workings. It aims to demonstrate the ways that long-term relationships, both formal and informal, may be productively established so that they are in place when a critical new crisis, like Zika, emerges. The chapter explores the decade-long history of collaboration, partnership and scientific labour of a US-Ecuadorian disease surveillance group working on Aedes agypti transmitted diseases in the city of Machala. The science of the State University of New York-Machala group, begun in 2007, has provided some of the most comprehensive social-ecological epidemiological investigations of Aedes aegypti transmitted diseases in the Americas. The need for researchers in the global south to produce locally relevant policy recommendations has been a key justification for health research capacity strengthening.
