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The Indiana Daily Student

IU professor awarded grant to study Zika

IU assistant professor Lucia Guerra-Reyes receives grant from the National Science Foundation. Guerra-Reyes is studying how people make decisions about pregnancy and contraception in communities under the threat of Zika.

More specifically, the assistant professor of applied health science at the IU School of Public Health-Bloomington is researching how men and women in Zika-threatened communities negotiate reproductive health decisions in the face of inequality, limited resources, poor information and disparate health access. 

The study, titled “RAPID: Understanding Emergent Responses and Decision-Making Under the Threat of Zika,” is funded by a $25,000 grant from the NSF’s Rapid Response Research program which is designed to provide support for research topics of “severe urgency,” according to an IU press release.

“This study focuses on understanding how gender negotiations may affect the spread of the virus,” Guerra-Reyes said in a press release. “It will produce information that will allow a better tailoring of preventive messages.”

The Zika virus, which is transmitted through the dengue mosquito and the tiger mosquito was first identified 50 years ago. The virus arrived in Brazil in 2015 and has spread to 33 countries and territories in the Americas. It has been linked to microcephaly and other fetal abnormalities and was found to also be transmittable through sexual intercourse. In February 2016, the World Health Organization declared Zika a global public health emergency, according to a press release.

Guerra-Reyes will conduct her research through focus groups and in-depth interviews with men and women in Iquitos, Peru, the largest metropolis in the Peruvian Amazon and the sixth most populous city in Peru. She traveled to Peru on June 2 and will work there until Aug. 8. 

There is currently no active Zika spread in Iquitos. However, the town is on a river floodplain, has a history of dengue mortality and is a high-risk area for mosquito-borne infections, according to a press release.

“This region has one of the highest fertility rates in the country and poor access to health care overall,” Guerra-Reyes said in a press release.

Among urban-poor women in Latin America, the Zika virus has shown inequalities in access to reproductive health information, contraception, sexual education and safe abortion care, Guerra-Reyes said. She said official responses advocating for abstinence and to delay pregnancy have placed the burden for prevention on women.

The NSF-funded project will aim to understand the changing cultural patterns to reproductive decisions under the threat of the Zika virus before the virus spreads.

Guerra-Reyes and colleague Ruth Iguiñiz-Romero, from the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia School of Public Health, will focus on the population’s reproductive health beliefs, reproductive decision-making and local perceptions of government responsibility and how they might change in the wake of the Zika virus. The study will also explore gender roles before the spread of the Zika virus in Peru, according to a press release.

Guerra-Reyes’ previous research has also focused on Peru and addressed health inequality, particularly the effects of cultural diversity and the understandings of culture on health care provision.

Leo Smith

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