After its cancellation in 2021 and its postponement to 2022, the Rio carnival was a great success last year.
Two days before the 2024 edition, a new threat looms.
Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's two most populous cities, have announced measures to deal with the explosion in dengue cases.
What deters some of the millions of tourists from all over the world who come every year?
Brazil recorded 345,235 probable cases of dengue fever in the first five weeks of the year, almost four times more than in 2023 at the same period (93,298), according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health.
The ministry also reports 31 confirmed deaths, while 234 others that may have been caused by this disease are still being analyzed.
Emergency state
In Sao Paulo, local authorities inaugurated on Tuesday, January 6, an Emergency Operations Center to monitor the progress of the disease in the largest megalopolis in Latin America and the more than 600 other cities in the state of the same name.
A drone that spreads larvicide in hard-to-reach places has been tested to neutralize mosquitoes transmitting this disease with symptoms similar to those of malaria.
The city of Rio de Janeiro, for its part, declared a state of public health emergency on Monday.
In this Mecca of the Brazilian carnival, which officially begins on Friday, the authorities have announced the opening of ten care centers to relieve congestion in hospitals.
“
Fortunately they opened this center, because hospitals alone cannot cope with this situation
,” says Ferreira, cleaning lady, patient at one of these care centers in Curicica, a working-class neighborhood in the west. from Rio.
A vaccination campaign in February
Other heavily affected cities have taken steps to combat dengue, such as the capital Brasilia, where a field hospital receives patients 24 hours a day. “
We give them basic care, we hydrate them, and then, either we let them out or we send them to a larger care center
,” explains Mauricio Braga, deputy director of Air Force Health Services.
The government announced two weeks ago that a free vaccination campaign targeting 3.2 million people would take place in February.
But the start date of immunization with the Qdenga vaccine, produced by the Japanese laboratory Takeda, has still not been announced.
The “ limited
” production capacity
of the laboratory does not allow mass vaccination, the authorities have decided to target 10-14 year olds, the age group which concentrates the greatest number of hospitalizations.
The government recently announced it was studying the possibility of increasing the number of doses available by producing vaccines in Brazil, a country of 203 million people.
One of the solutions considered is the production of the Qdenga vaccine by the public laboratory Fiocruz, which had already done the same with that of AstraZeneca during the Covid-19 pandemic.