A few days before the Rio Carnival, there was a dengue fever scare in Brazil

After canceling it in 2021 and postponing it until 2022, the Rio Carnival was a huge success last year. Two days before the 2024 edition, a new threat looms. Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two most populous cities, have announced measures to deal with an explosion in dengue cases. What deters some of the millions of tourists who come every year from around the world?

Brazil reported 345,235 possible cases of dengue fever in the first five weeks of the year, nearly four times more than in the same period in 2023 (93,298), according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health. The ministry also reported 31 confirmed deaths, while 234 others that may have been caused by the disease are being analyzed.

state of emergency

In São Paulo, local authorities inaugurated an emergency operations center on Tuesday, January 6, to monitor the progress of the disease in Latin America’s largest megalopolis and more than 600 other cities in the state of the same name. Drones that spread larvicide have been tested in hard-to-reach places to neutralize mosquitoes that carry the disease with malaria-like symptoms.

The city of Rio de Janeiro, for its part, declared a state of public health emergency on Monday. In this mecca of Brazil’s Carnival, which officially begins on Friday, officials have announced the opening of ten care centers to relieve overcrowding in hospitals. “Fortunately they opened this center, because hospitals alone cannot cope with this situation“, says Ferreira, a cleaner, a patient at one of these care centers in Curicica, a working-class neighborhood in western Rio.

Vaccination campaign in February

Other hard-hit cities have taken steps to combat dengue, such as the capital Brasília, where a 24-hour field hospital sees patients.We give them basic care, we hydrate them, and then we discharge them or we send them to a large care center.“, explains Mauricio Braga, Deputy Director of Health Services of the Air Force.

The government announced two weeks ago that a free vaccination campaign targeting 3.2 million people would be carried out in February. But the start date of vaccination with the Kyudenga vaccine produced by the Japanese laboratory Takeda has still not been announced.

production capacityLimited» From a laboratory that does not allow mass vaccination, authorities decided to target children aged 10-14, the age group that concentrates the highest number of hospitalizations. The government recently announced that it is studying the possibility of increasing the number of doses available by producing vaccines in Brazil, a country of 203 million people.

One of the solutions considered is the production of the Cudenga vaccine by the public laboratory Fiocruz, which it already did with AstraZeneca during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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