Yellow fever outbreak “biggest in decades” in the Americas

Brazil’s Minister of Health, Ricardo Barros, was quick to declare the end of the country’s yellow fever outbreak in June 2017, just eight months after it had first begun. But, experts say, Barros was too eager to declare the emergency over. Since then, 11 new cases have been confirmed – with four deaths.

This Monday, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) said that the number of yellow fever cases in humans and animals across the Americas is the highest in decades of monitoring. Brazil, with 777 confirmed cases and 261 confirmed deaths from yellow fever between December 2016 and August 2017, remains the only one of seven South American countries to have registered new cases last year.

Brazil first began recording new cases of the disease in December 2016, decades after the last urban case registered in 1942. In the following fourteen months, diagnoses were made in animals and humans in rural areas in the states of Espírito Santo, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais. But now, migrating through monkeys, mosquitos, and unvaccinated humans, diagnoses are edging dangerously close to urban areas.

On October 9, 2017, a monkey in São Paulo’s Horto Florestal region, bordering on the city’s northernmost...