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Is the Yellow Fever Outbreak in Brazil the New Zika?
An outbreak of yellow fever in some areas of Brazil has experts worried about the possibility of an epidemic that could find its way to the U.S.
Aedes aegypti mosquito.
In a new essay published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors from the National Institutes of Health warn that cases of yellow fever, which is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the same one that carries the Zika virus, have spiked in several rural areas in Brazil recently. The Washington Post reports that experts have been monitoring the outbreak since December and that it has so far mostly been contained to rural and jungle areas. However, there have been at least 371 confirmed cases, 220 deaths, and almost 1,000 more suspected cases, according to the L.A. Times.
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the co-authors of the new essay, notes that the outbreak is on the edge of larger, more densely populated metropolitan areas where people are unvaccinated. More worrisome, he writes, is that in the event of an actual epidemic, worldwide supplies of the vaccine are basically depleted. Only a few companies even make the vaccine, and manufacturing additional doses takes a long time. In fact, during outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola a few years ago, public health officials had to resort to giving people one-fifth the usual dose of the vaccine.
Dr. Fauci said that he considers it unlikely that an outbreak will spread but that he’d be more worried if yellow fever started appearing in big cities such as Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, or Brazilia. He also pointed out that many clinicians in the U.S. have never actually seen a case of yellow fever, so it’s important to be aware of and recognize the symptoms, especially in patients who may have recently traveled to areas where Zika is also present.
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Symptoms of yellow fever generally resemble that of the flu, but in around 15 percent of patients, it develops into a more severe form that includes jaundice, internal bleeding, organ failure, and shock. In approximately half of those cases, it leads to death.
“This isn’t ‘chicken little, the sky is falling,’ Dr. Fauci told the Washington Post. “It’s a public health heads up.”
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