{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}- State public health workers in Rio de Janeiro are addressing a surge in dengue fever cases, a mosquito-borne illness, during Brazil’s tourist season.
- The team is searching for standing water where mosquitoes may have laid eggs.
- Brazil is vulnerable to dengue outbreaks due to frequent rains and high temperatures that accelerate mosquito breeding.
The small team of state public health workers slalomed between auto parts strewn across a Rio de Janeiro junkyard, looking for standing water where mosquitoes might have laid their eggs.
They were part of nationwide efforts to curtail a surge in Brazil of the mosquito-borne illness of dengue fever during the country’s key tourist season that runs through the end of February.
Paulo Cesar Gomes, a 56-year-old entomologist, found some mosquito larvae swimming in shallow rainwater inside a car bumper.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}RIO DE JANEIRO HAS DECLARED A DENGUE HEALTH EMERGENCY DAYS BEFORE CARNIVAL IS DUE TO START
“We call this type of location a strategic point” because of the high turnover in items converging from all over, he said. “It’s difficult not to have mosquitoes here.”
Municipal health workers and volunteers are seen in the Copacabana neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Feb. 7, 2024. Local public health officials in Rio have been scouring the city’s neighborhoods and even its junkyards for signs of standing water where mosquitoes can lay their eggs. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)
Earlier in the month, just days before Rio kicked of its world-famous Carnival festivities, the city joined several states and the country’s capital in declaring a public health epidemic over this year’s greater-than-normal number of cases of dengue.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“We had more cases in January than any other January,” Ethel Maciel, head of health surveillance at Brazil’s Health Ministry, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
So far this year, Brazil has recorded 512,000 cases…
