Bolivia suffers the worst dengue epidemic in ten years

One of the rooms of the Children's Hospital in Santa Cruz, saturated with patients with dengue this Tuesday.Juan Carlos Torrejón (EFE)

The death of three babies on the same day showed the severity of the dengue epidemic in Bolivia, particularly in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

It is already considered the worst in ten years.

The children, barely months old, died at the doors of the hospitals, which could not care for them due to lack of space and resources.

All Santa Cruz hospitals have collapsed with almost 5,000 confirmed cases and approximately 25,000 suspected cases in this city, the most affected by the outbreak.

Cases have also been reported in other Bolivian cities with a tropical climate.

The disease is transmitted by the bite of the

mosquito .

“The children arrive bleeding and the doctors are not enough.

Children are dying due to different circumstances, because they arrive in a very poor general state and here we do what we can," Milkar Cáceres, the head of Emergencies at the Children's Hospital in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, told the press.

Dengue is more easily transformed into severe or hemorrhagic dengue in children under 12 years of age.

It is assumed that the serotype that is circulating is DENV-2.

If people who have previously suffered from the disease, but because of another serotype, are infected with it, they can also develop severe dengue.

In addition to the three small children who died last Monday, another 11 deaths have been officially registered since the beginning of this year, when the epidemic began.

Half were children.

The story of one of the deceased babies, who had not turned two months old, shocked the entire country.

Her mother, Mary Inés Cortez, unaware that there was an epidemic, moved with her entire family from a town located 800 kilometers from Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in search of a better delivery and adequate postnatal care.

“On Saturday she started with a fever and on Sunday I took her to the health center where they treated her, but they did not transfer her to a second level hospital.

According to them, with the medication they gave her, the fever would go away.

Since that did not happen, on Monday she went again.

“They already treated me well and they revived her twice to be able to transfer her to the Los Pocitos hospital, but she already arrived without vital signs;

she had passed away in the ambulance.

I came (to Santa Cruz) to seek better care and I'm going to take it in a drawer,"

Last weekend, municipal authorities of the Santa Cruz Governorate and the central government agreed to a truce in their political disputes and carried out a “minga” –which is how collective voluntary work is called locally– to destroy almost a million farms of mosquitoes located in gardens, roofs and parks.

The

lay their eggs in clean water, so any container that contains rain is a potential danger for the spread of the disease.

The people of Santa Cruz are asking the Government of Luis Arce to declare a health emergency, which has not happened yet.

A declaration of this type has important budgetary consequences, and the country is in a delicate economic moment.

Fuel subsidies, whose prices have risen around the world but remain stable in Bolivia, place a heavy burden on the public treasury.

This dengue epidemic came as Bolivia was beginning to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, which is no longer the country's number one health concern.

Tropical diseases such as dengue are chronic in Bolivia and have been considered by several economists as one of the main obstacles to its economic development.

Its eradication is difficult because keeping mosquitoes at bay not only requires great resources, but also more education and better living conditions for the population.

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