Brazil's Era of Epidemics

This is from my final report, submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities.  To see the full report, click here.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, there is little evidence of major epidemic activity beyond smallpox, measles, and scarlet fever in Brazil. Indeed, much of South America appears to have been spared from the cholera and influenza pandemics that killed millions in Asia, Europe and North America. Brazilians and foreign visitors noticed the country’s apparent immunity to these diseases. In fact, Brazil’s reputation of salubrity was widespread and frequently repeated in government publications and travelers’ reports. In late 1849, however, a strange new disease appeared in Bahia before spreading to Rio de Janeiro and other large Brazilian seaboard cities. The malady was recognizable as yellow fever to foreign doctors who had seen similar symptoms elsewhere. But the Emperor hesitated for more than a year to officially declare yellow fever’s presence, probably because he and his ministers (correctly) feared the damage this would do to its international reputation.

Optimists predicted that Brazil would return to its previous good health after simple sanitary reforms, but they were soon proven terribly wrong. Once yellow fever gained a foothold on the shores of Brazil, it persisted and eventually worsened. In fact, epidemics of yellow fever struck during the wet seasons repeatedly in the 1850s. After a hiatus in the 1860s, it reappeared in the early 1870s and was a serious problem for residents of Brazilian cities and foreign sailors arriving in Brazilian harbors until the early 1900s. Not until Walter Reed confirmed Carlos Finley’s hypothesis that the aedis aegypti mosquito was the disease vector could notable Brazilians like Oswaldo Cruz, Adolpho Lutz, and Guilherme Alvaro initiate eradication campaigns. These campaigns successfully diminished the breeding populations of the mosquito, lessening the grip of this dangerous disease in urban areas.

Yellow fever was not the only destructive disease that made an appearance. Cholera and bubonic plague were also new and deadly arrivals during these six decades. Cholera struck first in 1855, creating one of Brazil’s most virulent epidemics in recorded history, matched only perhaps by the smallpox epidemics that desolated indigenous populations in the sixteenth century. It reappeared in a weaker form in the 1860s throughout Brazil and then in the Southeast in the 1890s. Added to this problem, the first officially diagnosed cases of bubonic plague were recorded in Santos, in 1899. During this year and the next, new cases of plague were diagnosed in Rio de Janeiro, Recife and other Brazilian cities creating a great tide of fear, spurring new energy and investment into sanitary reform programs. Bubonic plague killed many, but never became epidemic.

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