An outbreak of yellow fever in Brazil

“ALL gone,” sighs Valmir Rossman as he scans the jungle surrounding his holding outside Santa Maria, a village in the state of Espírito Santo, north-east of Rio de Janeiro. Mr Rossman is a coffee farmer. Afternoons at his plantation used to echo to the calls of howler monkeys (pictured above) proclaiming their territories to potential interlopers. Since mid-February, however, he says he has neither heard nor seen a single one of them—except for two fresh carcasses he stumbled across where the coffee bushes give way to Atlantic rainforest, in the hills that mark the plantation’s edge.

Espírito Santo’s howler-monkey population is crashing. Mr Rossman’s corpses are two among 900 found this year by Sergio Mendes, a primatologist at the state’s federal university (UFES), and his team. In a typical year Dr Mendes would have expected his searchers to come across perhaps half a dozen such bodies during the same period. And something similar is happening in Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo’s inland neighbour. Analysis of the remains suggests the culprit is yellow fever.

It is easy to think of yellow fever, a mosquito-transmitted viral…Continue reading
Source: Economist