Health authorities in Brazil are rushing out limited supplies of a recently approved vaccine as they struggle to contain an unprecedented surge in dengue fever.
Several of Brazil’s most populous states have declared health emergencies in the past month just ahead of carnival season as rising global temperatures and heavy rains brought outbreaks of the tropical disease spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
Brazil has recorded 512 000 dengue cases so far this year—more than three times the number recorded for the same period last year. “We may see the largest number of dengue cases on record this year,” Fabiano Duarte Carvalho, a biologist at Brazil’s public health research institute, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), told Bloomberg. “The climate crisis has a direct impact on the proliferation of vectors such as Ae aegypti .”
Around three quarters of dengue cases are symptomless but the disease can be fatal. Symptoms include headaches, fever, and intense joint pain while serious cases can take several weeks to recover from.
Brazil was predicted to have a serious outbreak this …