Venezuela’s Health Crisis Is the Hemisphere’s Problem
As more than 3 million refugees ferry pathogens across borders, the Americas’ worst humanitarian crisis risks becoming a hemispheric emergency.
Bugs don’t care about borders.
Photographer: Juan Vita/AFP/Getty Images
It’s hard to cross a plaza or park in metropolitan South America without running into “The Liberator” Simon Bolivar, sword raised atop a bronze horse. But who remembers Arnoldo Gabaldon? The Venezuelan epidemiologist fought malaria with maps, field laboratories, quinine and armies of door-to-door fumigators, making Venezuela a pioneer in eradicating malaria in densely populated areas.
Gabaldon would be sweating in his bed netting today. Half a century on, Venezuela is a hothouse for malaria again, but also communicable miseries from HIV/AIDS to Zika. Forgotten diseases such as diphtheria and measles rage. Leprosy, tuberculosis and typhoid fever are back, alongside emerging mosquito-borne viruses, such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya. New HIV infections jumped 24 percent from 2010 to 2016.