The epidemics South America can’t shake

When it comes to public health crises and emergencies, it is hard to compete with the impact of the Covid pandemic, undeniably the most challenging period Latin America’s weak and unequal health systems have faced in decades, resulting in more than 1.76 million deaths since 2020. 

But Covid is not the sole instance of a virus that the region’s limited health apparatus struggles to contain. The perennial examples are dengue fever and chikungunya, which have long afflicted poor communities in tropical and subtropical climates, and, unfortunately, have expanded their reach in recent years.

Dengue epidemics have been recorded in Brazil since the early 1990s, but figures are on the rise. According to the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a federal biological research organization, reported cases of the mosquito-borne disease increased by 162 percent from 2021 to 2022, approaching 1.5 million last year. 

Last year was also the deadliest for the disease in recent Brazilian history, with 1,016 dengue deaths registered, close to the totals seen in the 1980s, when the virus wreaked havoc across the country. The number of deaths recorded last year in Brazil alone is close to the total number of fatalities counted in all of Latin America in 2019, during the 2019–2020 dengue fever epidemic.

The record broke two years of relatively low dengue fever incidence during the pandemic. Experts attribute the...