When U.S. president George W. Bush called on Africa the other day, he was greeted with a rare show of bonhomie. Chalk it up to mosquito diplomacy. After all, few continents on earth are more plagued by bug-borne diseases.( 80 percent of the 1 million deaths a year caused by malaria are logged in sub-Saharan Africa.) Like some Bill Gates manqué, Bush handed out thousands of bed nets to grateful crowds in Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Rwanda and Tanzania. Too bad the Exterminator stopped there.
Plenty of folks across the Atlantic could also use some pest control. Not least in Brazil, where an old scourge has come roaring back. Latin America's largest nation is in the throes of one of its deadliest epidemics of dengue fever on record - far deadlier, in fact, than officials let on. According to O Estado de São Paulo, 324 people died from dengue fever in 2006 and 2007. That's 45 percent more dengue-related deaths than the Brazilian health ministry acknowledges. What's behind the numbers gap? An actuarial sleight of hand.
Officially, a total of 225 Brazilians died from dengue fever in the last two years. That's a lot fewer bodies than the 101 the press is reporting. It seems that the more modest number is explained by the fact that the government counts only those infected with a particularly aggressive strain of the disease known as hemmorhagic dengue, which can cause severe internal bleeding and shut down the vital organs.
That method may sound reasonable. The four other known varieites of the contagion can cause high fever and excruciating body aches (hence the nickname break-bone fever) but are not normally fatal. Besides, Brasília says, the World Health Organization, for the sake of comparing outbreaks country to country, also confines its calculations of dengue-related deaths to the deadlier hemmorhagic version.
Yet that clouds the real dimensions of the disease. Thanks to dengue's global reach, tens of millions of people throughout the tropics have been exposed to the virus. But unlike so many other contagious diseases, say measles or mumps, exposure to one strain of the virus is no defense against the next. On the contrary, a second bout of dengue, especially if it's virulent type 3 dengue, can be far worse, even fatal.
So while hemmorhagic dengue took 158 lives in Brazil in 2007, 82 more people died of other strains of the virus. And this year is looking even worse: in January and February dengue claimed four times as many lives as the same period last year.
No wonder more and more people in Rio de Janeiro are dialing Tele-Dengue, the official hotline, to learn how to fight back against the contagion. First, however, they'll have to overcome another fearsome epidemic of our times: the epic prerecorded message. "Your call is very important to us..." drones the cheery voice on the other end. At least while you're on hold you'll have plenty of time to string up that mosquito netting.
