Why is Brazil haunted by mosquito-borne diseases?

In the face of the worst yellow fever outbreak in decades, Brazilians waited hours at a time for vaccinations against the fatal disease in January this year. But yellow fever is far from the only mosquito-borne disease to sweep across the continent. In the last five years alone, Brazil has had serious outbreaks of three threatening arboviruses: Chikungunya, dengue, and the Zika virus.

Most recently, data from the Ministry of Health showed that the Amazon region has registered a 50-percent increase in the number of malaria cases from 2016 to 2017.

Last year, the region recorded 194,000 cases; the trend looks set to continue into 2018, with 17,000 cases in January this year. This rapid incline has come as a shock to the Brazilian government, which celebrated a 29 percent decrease in cases as recently as 2015.

Almost all of Brazil’s latest wave of malaria cases have the Amazonian region as their backdrop, with Acre, Amazonas and Pará registering the highest numbers. Pará’s state health secretariat has launched an emergency plan in the hopes of tackling high disease rates, which includes encouraging residents to use repellent-laced nets in their homes, and will increase resources for lab testing and professional training.

While the Ministry of Health blamed “environmental conditions” and the “disease’s own cycles” for the recent malaria outbreaks, scientific experts interviewed by The Brazilian Report believe that the reasons behind the outbreaks of malaria, Zika, dengue, and Chikungunya are more complex.