Yellow Fever Outbreak In Brazil Could Become An Epidemic, Officials Fear

Public health officials in Brazil suspect that a small yellow fever outbreak in Minas Gerais, a populous landlocked state adjacent to São Paulo state, has infected 110 people and killed 30, according to a Friday report. There is a vaccine for yellow fever, but because the outbreak is taking hold in areas with low vaccination rates, officials are concerned that the disease could continue to spread beyond the state’s borders and cause a larger epidemic, according to the World Health Organization. Yellow fever is spread by the same mosquito that spreads Zika virus, dengue fever and chikungunya.  Brazil’s ministry of health has deployed teams to the state to help investigate the outbreak, kill mosquitos (the virus is mosquito-borne) and immunize residents, all in the hope of containing the outbreak to Minas Gerais. States that border Minas Gerais could experience large outbreaks, WHO notes, because they harbor the Aedes mosquito and the population is not immunized at all against yellow fever, as these areas were previously thought to be low-risk. The country is still recovering from the Zika virus outbreak, another mosquito-borne disease that infected an estimated 214,193 people and resulted in the births of 2,366 infants with congenital Zika syndrome from 2015 to 2017. Minas Gerais has experienced yellow fever epidemics before; the last one was in 2002 to 2003, when 63 people got the fever and 23 people died. Other Brazilian states have exp...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news