Latin America-Epidemics
11-19-1995
^By ANDREW SELSKY=
^Associated Press Writer=
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) _ September: In a remote Colombian peninsula, thousands of Indians fall ill. As family members watch helplessly, some of the victims become delirious, go into convulsions and die.
October: Hundreds of people, stricken with fevers and body aches, crowd a village clinic in Nicaragua. Autopsies on those who succumb discover their lungs are filled with blood.
Specialists scrambled in recent weeks to deal with these outbreaks of rare diseases. But while they are dangerous and alarming, epidemics of more common diseases like cholera and dengue fever have quietly spread through Latin America and are claiming thousands of lives each year.
Health experts say minor outbreaks of diseases imported from Latin America can be expected in the United States. But they say there is little risk of epidemics because the United States has adequate insecticide spraying and proper sanitary systems.
The problem in Latin America is the lack of financial resources to pay for the medicines, insecticides and other steps needed to cure diseases or control the conditions that help spread them.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Latin American nations tried to eradicate the mosquito that carries dengue. Insecticide-spraying pushed the mosquito, Aedes aegypti, back to a few pockets in the jungle and almost wiped it out. But the effort was dropped because of high costs.
This past week the Pan American Health Organization announced that Aedes aegypti has regained the territory it formerly occupied. It said dengue is raging in Latin America, sickening 200,000 people and killing 76 this year alone.
"In the past couple of decades we let down our guard," said David Heymann, director of the World Health Organization's new Epidemic Strike Force.
An international conference to be held in Brazil on Nov. 30 is aimed at renewing the mosquito-eradication efforts.
Doctors are also busy fighting new diseases.
One of the first missions of the Epidemic Strike Force, created on Oct. 1, was in northwestern Nicaragua, where a killer disease baffled doctors until early November.
"People were dying left and right," said Dan Epstein, spokesman for the Pan American Health Organization, who recently returned from Nicaragua to his Washington office. "They were suffocating in their own blood."
Medical experts from Nicaragua, the United States and Cuba fanned out into the countryside, looking for cases and trying to identify the disease.
Epstein said some thought it was a form of Ebola, an incurable disease that causes massive hemorrhaging and killed 244 Zaireans in Africa in an outbreak earlier this year. But suspicion fell more on hemorrhagic dengue, which causes severe body aches and blood vessels to leak.
One expert from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used a vacuum cleaner mounted on his back to suck up insects for inspection. The medical sleuths were perplexed when no Aedes aegypti turned up.
Then came word from the Atlanta headquarters of the CDC, where tissue samples of the dead had been analyzed. The disease was leptospirosis, which infects humans when waste matter from diseased rodents mixes with drinking water or is absorbed through breaks in the skin.
"It's easy to treat," Epstein said. Antibiotics were rushed to the region. But by then, 33 people had died.
Similarly, equine encephalitis _ which killed at least 26 people in Colombia's Guajira peninsula _ can be treated in its early stages. And it can be controlled by eradicating mosquitoes.
Increased rainfall contributed to the Nicaragua outbreak, when flooding forced rats from their holes. It also has intensified the dengue increase by producing pools of water that give mosquitoes more breeding areas.
Tuberculosis, malaria and cholera have also taken root in Latin America.
Cholera arrived in 1991 when an Asian ship dumped infected bilge water into a Peruvian port. It quickly spread to more than a dozen countries, infecting more than 1 million people and killing 10,000.
The fight against cholera has been a bright spot. After a campaign by health officials urging people to boil water, avoid uncooked foods and wash hands before eating, cholera has been on the decline since 1993.
But disease experts are warning governments they must not let up in the fight to eradicate cholera, or _ like dengue _ it can make a comeback.
In Bolivia, for instance, the number of cholera cases for the year recently skyrocketed, from 718 through mid-September to more than 2,400 by early November, according to the Pan American Health Organization and the Bolivian government.
Bolivia's health secretary, Oscar Sandoval, said his nation is redoubling its education efforts and sending medicines to combat the surge.
Some of Latin America's diseases are creeping toward the United States. Dengue may already be arriving.
Some 1,200 dengue cases have been reported in the past five months in Mexico's Tamaulipas state bordering the United States.
In October, Texas officials reported the first case of dengue fever contracted inside the United States since 1986.
^By ANDREW SELSKY=
^Associated Press Writer=
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) _ September: In a remote Colombian peninsula, thousands of Indians fall ill. As family members watch helplessly, some of the victims become delirious, go into convulsions and die.
October: Hundreds of people, stricken with fevers and body aches, crowd a village clinic in Nicaragua. Autopsies on those who succumb discover their lungs are filled with blood.
Specialists scrambled in recent weeks to deal with these outbreaks of rare diseases. But while they are dangerous and alarming, epidemics of more common diseases like cholera and dengue fever have quietly spread through Latin America and are claiming thousands of lives each year.
Health experts say minor outbreaks of diseases imported from Latin America can be expected in the United States. But they say there is little risk of epidemics because the United States has adequate insecticide spraying and proper sanitary systems.
The problem in Latin America is the lack of financial resources to pay for the medicines, insecticides and other steps needed to cure diseases or control the conditions that help spread them.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Latin American nations tried to eradicate the mosquito that carries dengue. Insecticide-spraying pushed the mosquito, Aedes aegypti, back to a few pockets in the jungle and almost wiped it out. But the effort was dropped because of high costs.
This past week the Pan American Health Organization announced that Aedes aegypti has regained the territory it formerly occupied. It said dengue is raging in Latin America, sickening 200,000 people and killing 76 this year alone.
"In the past couple of decades we let down our guard," said David Heymann, director of the World Health Organization's new Epidemic Strike Force.
An international conference to be held in Brazil on Nov. 30 is aimed at renewing the mosquito-eradication efforts.
Doctors are also busy fighting new diseases.
One of the first missions of the Epidemic Strike Force, created on Oct. 1, was in northwestern Nicaragua, where a killer disease baffled doctors until early November.
"People were dying left and right," said Dan Epstein, spokesman for the Pan American Health Organization, who recently returned from Nicaragua to his Washington office. "They were suffocating in their own blood."
Medical experts from Nicaragua, the United States and Cuba fanned out into the countryside, looking for cases and trying to identify the disease.
Epstein said some thought it was a form of Ebola, an incurable disease that causes massive hemorrhaging and killed 244 Zaireans in Africa in an outbreak earlier this year. But suspicion fell more on hemorrhagic dengue, which causes severe body aches and blood vessels to leak.
One expert from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used a vacuum cleaner mounted on his back to suck up insects for inspection. The medical sleuths were perplexed when no Aedes aegypti turned up.
Then came word from the Atlanta headquarters of the CDC, where tissue samples of the dead had been analyzed. The disease was leptospirosis, which infects humans when waste matter from diseased rodents mixes with drinking water or is absorbed through breaks in the skin.
"It's easy to treat," Epstein said. Antibiotics were rushed to the region. But by then, 33 people had died.
Similarly, equine encephalitis _ which killed at least 26 people in Colombia's Guajira peninsula _ can be treated in its early stages. And it can be controlled by eradicating mosquitoes.
Increased rainfall contributed to the Nicaragua outbreak, when flooding forced rats from their holes. It also has intensified the dengue increase by producing pools of water that give mosquitoes more breeding areas.
Tuberculosis, malaria and cholera have also taken root in Latin America.
Cholera arrived in 1991 when an Asian ship dumped infected bilge water into a Peruvian port. It quickly spread to more than a dozen countries, infecting more than 1 million people and killing 10,000.
The fight against cholera has been a bright spot. After a campaign by health officials urging people to boil water, avoid uncooked foods and wash hands before eating, cholera has been on the decline since 1993.
But disease experts are warning governments they must not let up in the fight to eradicate cholera, or _ like dengue _ it can make a comeback.
In Bolivia, for instance, the number of cholera cases for the year recently skyrocketed, from 718 through mid-September to more than 2,400 by early November, according to the Pan American Health Organization and the Bolivian government.
Bolivia's health secretary, Oscar Sandoval, said his nation is redoubling its education efforts and sending medicines to combat the surge.
Some of Latin America's diseases are creeping toward the United States. Dengue may already be arriving.
Some 1,200 dengue cases have been reported in the past five months in Mexico's Tamaulipas state bordering the United States.
In October, Texas officials reported the first case of dengue fever contracted inside the United States since 1986.
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