Alexandre da Costa Linhares (★1952 †2025)

Linhares conducted pioneering studies on rotavirus in Brazil while still a medical student and later as an intern at the Evandro Chagas Institute (IEC) in Belém during the 1970s, where he remained until his retirement in 2019.He served as the head of the Virology section from 1987 to 2019 and as director of the IEC between 1981 and 1987.In 1975, he carried out his initial investigation of rotavirus in children with acute diarrhea treated at the Hospital da Santa Casa de Misericórdia do Pará in Belém.Rotavirus was detected in the feces of four children out of the 25 examined.The agent was identifi ed using electron microscopy at the Bernard Nocht Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and via enzymelinked immunosorbent assay at the IEC.In 1977, Dr. Linhares demonstrated that rotavirus was responsible for an explosive epidemic of acute diarrhea among indigenous individuals of the Tiriyó tribe, located in the northern part of the state of Pará 1 .The epidemic occurred in July and August of that year, aff ecting 157 (70%) of the 224 inhabitants of the main village, with one recorded death in a 1-year-old child.