‘I felt pains all over my body’: Argentina battles dengue outbreak as politicians pass up vaccine opportunity

Closely packed houses in Villa 31, one of the largest slums in Buenos Aires. Photograph: The Guardian Photograph: The Guardian

On a particularly warm autumn afternoon in Buenos Aires, Michelly Natalí Barreto Sánchez, 22, began to feel unwell. As she served customers at La Boca, the bar she had opened in Villa 31, one of the capital’s largest slums, she suddenly started to experience severe headaches and dizziness.

She told her customers, who are among the 70,000 people who live in this densely populated area close to the city centre, that she would have to close the bar, and she headed home.

“It was a matter of hours before I felt pains all over my body,” she says. “My bones hurt. I tried to eat, and everything came back up, and in the following days, I couldn’t even swallow water. I vomited the medication I took and had to hold on to the walls to walk.”

Dengue in Argentina broke a record this year. In the first eight weeks of 2024, authorities reported 57,461 confirmed cases and 47 deaths, a 2,153% increase compared with the same period last year. Recent data from the health ministry indicates a new record was reached in March when cases rose to 233,000 and deaths to 161.

I waited 11 hours to be seen in a waiting room where people screamed in pain from their bones

Michelly Natalí Barreto Sánchez

The spike in cases occurred in the same year Argentina registered record temperatures, providing the conditions for the Aedes aegypti mosquito to thrive. An as-yet-unpublished report from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Conicet) associated with the University of Buenos Aires, two leading Argentine institutions, paints a picture of the current state of the epidemic in the country.

“Our study shows that the thermal favourability for the mosquito to continue acting for longer has increased and, in this year’s case, has spread among more people,” says Sylvia Fischer, a researcher at Conicet and a co-author of the forthcoming report. “The conditions of large cities, with a large part of the population living in densely populated areas, is another significant factor.”

Hospital overcrowding aggravates the epidemic’s impact on vulnerable people. Natalí Barreto witnessed dreadful scenes when she spent a week at a public hospital. “I waited 11 hours to be seen in a waiting room where people screamed in pain from their bones,” she says. “There are many interns there. They kept missing my vein, and I was reluctant to let them draw my blood any more.”

José Salgado, 31, is a cartonero, a cardboard collector in the city’s rubbish dumps, who contracted dengue haemorrhagic fever, a severe form of the disease. “It wasn’t very clear to me how exposed I was until the doctors who treated me later explained. I feel that there aren’t information campaigns, at least not as there should be, in the densely populated neighbourhoods,” says Salgado, who lives in Berazatégui, a district in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area.

“Digging through trash, which for many Argentinians is their only job, is highly dangerous amid a dengue epidemic,” says Fischer.

More than 57% of Argentina’s 46 million people live in poverty. A 2022 report from the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development under the Peronist government of Alberto Fernández noted: “In rural populations and densely populated urban neighbourhoods, the conditions of temperature, humidity, and water precipitation favour the reproduction of the Aedes aegypti mosquito. This risk is especially present in areas of unplanned urban expansion.”

That is the case in Berazatégui: children playing football on vacant land punctuated by puddles of water – a breeding ground for mosquitoes – is a common sight.

Environmentalists point to the government’s responsibility for the high dengue figures. Camila Mercure, responsible for climate policy at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation, argues that far-right president Javier Milei’s decision to downgrade the environment ministry “does not aid in the formulation of public policies”.

Carlos Regazzoni, a doctor and former Buenos Aires secretary of social development, says vaccination would be essential to fight the dengue epidemic. However, although approved by the National Administration of Drugs, Foods and Medical Technology (Anmat), the vaccine is not on the agenda.

The government argues that there is no evidence to prove its efficacy across all age groups and that vaccinating now would not combat the current outbreak, as it would only protect people from future outbreaks.

Only those who can afford to pay private clinics between $150 and $160 (£120 to £127) get vaccinated.

“It would be worrying and frustrating if this decision were related to a government’s denialist stance,” says Regazzoni.

The government seems to act as if it doesn’t acknowledge global warnings and doesn’t respect international commitments

Camila Mercure, climate activist

When asked about the government’s concern regarding dengue, Milei’s government spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, said: “Anything that kills human beings is a concern for the government, including car accidents.”

On ruling out the inclusion of the dengue vaccine in the country’s vaccination schedule in March, Adorni told a press conference: “Immunity is obtained with time, so by vaccinating now, that immunity will only be obtained in four months, when the mosquito is no longer an inconvenience, and the effectiveness has not been proven.”

The president’s statements on the climate crisis reinforce the suspicion of vaccine denialism on the part of the Milei government. Milei has said that Argentina would not continue with the Paris Agreement and that global heating was a cyclical issue that would eventually pass.

Milei’s administration has made no secret of its contempt for environmental matters, and the president called the climate crisis a ‘“socialist lie”, and reduced the health ministry’s budget by 40%.

On 2 April, the health ministry published a note on X that questioned the vaccine’s efficacy, saying it would wait for “more scientific evidence” before offering it to the public. “The vaccine is not a validated tool for controlling the transmission of the disease in the context of the outbreak, as expressed by the Pan American Health Organization”, the note said.

Mercure says the far-right government doesn’t appear to care about the climate crisis or its consequences, such as the dengue fever outbreak. “The government seems to act as if it doesn’t acknowledge global warnings and doesn’t respect international commitments to mitigate the effects of climate change,” she says.

One consequence of this lack of interest is that stocks of mosquito repellants in Buenos Aires are not meeting demand. “My main issue with the government is not just the lack of public policies to combat dengue but also this shortage of repellants, which could be mitigated by government purchases and distribution to the public,” Fischer says.

Meanwhile, in Villa 31, Natalí Barreto has reopened her bar. “I lost money from being sick for almost a month,” she says as we walk through the potholed streets. “But I’ll stock up on repellant when available.”