Brazil cuts science budget amid mounting yellow fever threat
By
Miguel Andrade
8 November 2017
The yellow fever deaths of three apes living in the Horto Florestal environmental state park bordering São Paulo’s northern sector has brought to the fore the looming danger posed to the Brazilian population by the spread of the deadly disease. This threat has been intensified by the scorched earth policy that every level of government is imposing on the country’s health care and scientific sectors amid the worst economic crisis in a century.
Since the beginning of the decade, the country has faced a series of infrastructure-related health emergencies, most notably the mosquito-borne Zika virus outbreak in 2015.
Despite the worldwide attention received by the Zika outbreak, fueled in part by the tragic images of malformations caused in babies born to Zika-infected women, there was less notice of the impact of another two viral diseases spread by the same Aedes aegypti mosquito—the Dengue and Chikungunya fevers. These diseases were the cause of a record 800 deaths in Brazil during the same year, mainly in the impoverished northeast region, which has the fastest growth of urbanization in the country. The total number of infections from the three viruses was estimated at 4 million, with a potential for many times more due to under-notification of milder cases, often confused with the flu.
With Aedes aegypti populations surging higher every summer as forestry management and mosquito eradication efforts decline, the major risk now is that the mosquito becomes able to carry some strain of yellow fever, allowing the return of the so-called “urban cycle” of the deadly disease, eradicated from Brazilian cities in 1942.
Urban virus eradication was achieved with the…