RIDDLE IN NINE SYLLABLES
Paul Jacoulet’s Le Trésor addresses the complex psychological experience of having and being a mother and explored the uniqueness of the experience by capturing facets of maternity in the floating world. Maternal and child health, its own riddle intertwined with pregnancy, features in disease emergence because special populations, pregnant women among them, and their response to emergence are key to successful disease prevention and control. Jacoulet did not know the physical hazards involved in being a vessel. The genetically foreign fetus challenges a woman’s core defense against disease, the immune system, which has to make changes if the pregnancy is to succeed. These changes, not well understood, may alter susceptibility to and severity of certain infectious diseases, among them toxoplasmosis, listeriosis, malaria, measles, and could increase death rates from others, such as influenza and varicella. Hepatitis E virus infections continue to cause a disproportionate number of deaths among pregnant women in developing countries, despite the availability of vaccines.
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dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1809.AC1809
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