Brazil
Brazil’s social and environmental conditions and its rich biodiversity support the conditions necessary for emergence and reemergence of infectious diseases. Thus, there is an increasing need to bolster surveillance activities to better control and prevent outbreaks. Brazil has a variety of arboviruses that are maintained in enzootic cycles in the Amazon region and can infect humans in close contact with wild habitats. Deforestation for cattle production has also played an important role as a driver for the reemergence of diseases in recent years. Development in Brazil has resulted in the industrialization of the southwestern region while keeping the rural regions underdeveloped. One of the symptoms of this development strategy is that actions for containing outbreaks or investigations on emerging/reemerging diseases are typically carried out when diseases are directly threatening the great urban centers. As is often the case, the urbanization process has favored the emergence and dissemination of new diseases formerly confined to endemic niches, lending itself to the need for the development of an extended surveillance system. PREDICT implementing partner: EcoHealth Alliance.
Country Coordinator: Alessandra Nava
Alessandra Nava is a wildlife veterinarian and for almost a decade she has dedicated her life to the field of conservation medicine in Brazil. She works with sentinel species such as jaguars, ocelots and peccaries at the interface of wildlife with domestic animals. Alessandra is an Overbrook Conservation Fellow and she received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of São Paulo. She is currently working as senior scientist with EcoHealth Alliance and has been coordinating EcoHealth Alliance projects in Brazil since 2006, including being the country coordinator of PREDICT Brazil.
WCS Brazil Coordinator: Flávia Miranda
Flavia Miranda is a veterinarian who was the first intern in medical practice and wildlife management at Fundação Parque Zoológico in São Paulo. Other degrees include postgraduate Biology, a certificate in wildlife management from the University of Tolima (Colombia), Ecology from the University of São Paulo, and she is currently a PhD candidate in Biogeography at the USP. Her specialties include giant and lesser anteater. Since 2007, Flávia has been coordinating Wildlife Conservation Society’s Global Health Program in Brazil, where she works to implement the “One World/One Health” concept and PREDICT.
