Autor: Isabel Braga

The same tablet that takes a headache away also, in the laboratory, leaves joy, fear, empathy and risk a little more opaque. That is not internet speculation: it came from placebo-controlled trials at universities such as Ohio State and the University of British Columbia (UBC). The question those laboratories did not ask — and that obstetrics almost never crosses — is whether the mechanism that blunts the adult could, in theory, touch circuits the fetus is still building. What the blunting studies actually measured It is not “paracetamol kills the soul.” It is an acute, small-to-moderate effect after 1 gram…

Isabel Braga Guarus, in plain English It was not a brand-name hotel. It was a house at Rua Ary Ribeiro Vaz, 92, Custodópolis, Guarus — four rooms in a row, a chain on the door, a padlock on the window, a gun at the entrance. From May 2008 to May 2009, girls aged 8 to 17 were taken from there by car to motels and hotels in Campos. The Public Prosecutor said, at a 2015 hearing, that some were forced into as many as 30 commercial encounters a day and made to take cocaine, crack, hashish, ecstasy and marijuana. The…

On 28 April 2026 I walked into a hearing room of the Brazilian Senate with a slide deck and the medical-expertise files of the house that employs me. The bill on the table, PL 2.745/2021, authored by Senator Jorge Kajuru of Goiás, wanted “false information about vaccines” written into the Penal Code. I spoke as a tenured public servant, not as the voice of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation — Fiocruz, the federal institute that fills the Oxford–AstraZeneca shot at Bio-Manguinhos and that, twenty-six days later, would take me to court. What I put on the screen that morning was not…

Isabel Braga Portuguese original: https://revistapahnorama.com.br/2026/09/17/a-chave-que-abre-demais/ Picture four brothers. All of them are called dengue. One, two, three and four. Meet brother 1 and you usually get a fright and stay on your feet. The blood keeps a key to that door. Years later brother 3 arrives. The old key fits crooked. It does not lock. It pushes. The virus walks into the cell more easily than if the door had never been touched. It copies itself more. The person swells, bleeds, is admitted. Doctors call this ADE: the antibody that should defend helps the guest. It is not folklore. It…

Isabel Braga The active ingredients most used in Brazil coincide with substances associated, in the literature and in my study in São Paulo, with early abortion and fetal malformation. The volume sold has not stopped rising. The pregnant woman in the interior does not need to live inside the cane field to be exposed. Wind, river, well, market food and the work clothes that come home are enough. The first trimester — when the embryo organises itself and early abortion almost never enters the statistic — is the quietest window and the most critical. In 2022 I defended, at the…

Isabel Braga Synthesis with official sources and clinical trials · August 2026 Original: https://revistapahnorama.com.br/2026/08/30/hiv-no-brasil-mapa-prep-sifilis-sus/ · Faithful English translation. No facts added. The premise the debate usually swaps This text does not discuss whether someone is a man, a woman, homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. Those words describe identity, affection and politics. HIV and Treponema pallidum read none of them. They find epithelium. They find anal mucosa — thin, little keratinised, rich in vessels, easily abraded in coitus — and vaginal and cervical mucosa, also vascularised, also exposed to micro-injury, also able to receive virus and bacterium. The epidemiological category “men who…

Isabel de Fátima Alvim Braga Portuguese version: https://revistapahnorama.com.br/2026/09/16/a-corrente-vai-para-o-sul-a-melanina-ja-esta-na-parede/ Rio de Janeiro has nuclear a plant that leaks. That is documented. It is not a slogan: it is the file we published in Pàhnorama — “The nuclear plant leaks: the litre, the silence and the partner” ( Read here: https://revistapahnorama.com.br/2026/08/29/the-nuclear-plant-leaks-the-liter-the-silence-and-the-partner/ ) In September 2022, water with low radioactive content left Angra 1 through a corroded valve, reached the slab, the storm drain and Itaorna Bay. Estimated volume: about 90 litres. The Federal Court measured 21 days of delay in the notice. Ibama fined the company. Eletronuclear admitted a communication failure. In…

How IQ tests became identity, praise for intelligence trained fear of error, the gifted child became a digital trophy — and what The Society of Tantrums sets against that: mental endurance, not the number. Isabel de Fátima Alvim Braga Original: https://revistapahnorama.com.br/2026/09/11/superdotacao-e-altas-habilidades-o-numero-o-treino-e-o-destino/ The thesis The book The Society of Tantrums starts from a claim the IQ market does not like to hear: past a certain point, the number stops predicting what the family expects it to predict. Above IQ 120, chances of personal and professional success converge — and grit, mental endurance, is what separates those who persist from those who…

Portuguese original (keep this link): https://revistapahnorama.com.br/2026/09/18/a-industria-da-fiv/ Isabel de Fatima Alvim Braga, MD phD In vitro fertilisation is the technical name of a market. On one side, women and couples who tried and did not succeed — or who postponed pregnancy and now buy time in the freezer. On the other, clinics, high-cost pharmacies, nitrogen tanks and a language that mixes medicine and shop window. In the middle, a body that takes an injection every day and signs a form almost no one reads to the end. No one needs to deny that the technique has given children back. What needs…