Brazil’s New Era of Epidemics

The current and third period of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, Zika, yellow fever, dengue fever, and the coronavirus, can be blamed on greater and faster movements of people who bring germs with them. Non-human factors like genetic mutation and climate fl uctuations always have an impact but within social contexts. Indeed, the great stages of human migration and globalization were marked by epidemics.

To understand what shape Brazil might have taken had the fi rst period of epidemics not occurred, we must compare the Portuguese colonization efforts in India and Africa, where dense settlements of immunologically resistant native peoples kept Portuguese to coastal fortresses. Furthermore, Brazil owes its Afro-Brazilian heritage in part to disease because slaves were imported from Africa in response to a perception that the declining native populations could not meet an acute "need" for laborers.
The Portuguese occasionally witnessed the epidemics that cut through indigenous communities in the 1500s. Despite this, naturalists characterized Brazil as perpetually verdant, fertile, and extraordinarily healthy from its beginning. As early as 1576, the Portuguese chronicler Pero de Magalhães Gândavo wrote Brazil's air was "so pure and well-tempered" that it "restores and prolongs human life 3 ." After the Dutch seized most of the northeastern Brazilian coast in the 1630s, cholera, and infl uenza. Charles Darwin echoed a common opinion, writing in 1839 during a stop in Peru that "[diseasecausing] miasma is not always produced by a luxuriant vegetation with an ardent climate: for many parts of Brazil, even where there are marshes and a rank vegetation, are much more healthy than this sterile coast." Brazil's three-century-old reputation of exceptionally good health was abruptly ruined when a new wave of epidemics struck in 1849, again transforming Brazil. That year, thousands of people traveled to prospect for gold in California, and most had layovers in Rio de Janeiro. With more and faster ships crisscrossing the Atlantic, three new diseases, all utterly unfamiliar and terrifying, were carried across the sea in microbes colonizing vessels of potable water, nestling within human bodies, and reproducing within blood and saliva of various ectoparasites. Yellow fever's urban mosquito vector, the Aedes aegypti, landed fi rst and caused widespread disease, especially among previously unexposed Europeans. It transformed Brazilian ports and expansive coastal lowlands into frightening places for immigrants, sailors, merchants, and investors. Cholera (1854-1868) took hundreds of thousands of victims among sugar and agricultural workers, most enslaved and poor people of color. In some provinces, the slave population fell by more than a third in a few years. Smallpox was old and familiar, having become entrenched on the coast after 1850. Smallpox worsened even as vaccination began controlling it in large parts of Europe and North America. Infl uenza pandemics leaped across the North Atlantic in the nineteenth century, but Brazilians seemed to escape until 1890. That year, Brazilians suffered from the fl u along with much of the rest of the world. Finally, the urban poor of its large northeastern cities were most at risk to be bitten by rats infected by bubonic plague (1899-1940s), also an unwelcome newcomer to the nation.
When rats carrying the plague bacteria began to scurry among the docks and alleyways of the frenetic port of Santos in 1899, Brazilians saw their country slipping backward. Rui Barbosa, one of the founders of the Republican regime and coauthor of the Brazilian Constitution of 1891, wrote the "destruction caused by plagues, defamation by our climate, disastrous reputation of poor health, and incalculable infl uence exerted by this phantasm for the settlement of this territory, has marked it to the foreigner as the habitat of death 4 ." The consequences of Brazil's second period of epidemics went beyond immigration. Besides a tragic and often preventable loss of life, the nation's plagues in the middle and late nineteenth century caused positive and negative changes. They damaged slavery, destabilized economies and governments under late Imperial and early Republican regimes, created a more secularized and medicalized society, and shaped Brazil's demographic profi le for generations to come.
Pathologies were ecological and social. Diseases altered Brazilian self-awareness and national sentiment, transforming a young nation thought for centuries to be a blessed Eden of robust peoples into a dangerous, degenerate and dark place not distinct from the rest of the "torrid zone." The country's extreme regional inequality, lower number of immigrant workers (compared to its largest neighbors), and highly urbanized population are in no small part due to microbes and the ways that Brazilians, foreign merchants, and prospective What may stop the rise of infectious disease and the death they _________________________________ 4 "Pouco ou nada haveria que lançar, a este respeito, nos Estados Unidos, á conta de uma verba, cuja enormidade, entre nós, sobrepuja á das assolações directa produzidos pelo falagello; a diffamação do nosso clima, a reputação destrosa de insalubridade, a in luencia incalculavel exercida por esse phantsma sobre o povoamento do nosso territorio, assignalado ao estrangeiro como o habitat da morte." A Imprensa, Feb 6, 1899.
bring, we beg to know? A global phenomenon requires a global response. Currently, the World Health Organization can issue recommendations, supply guidance, and provide resources, but it can hardly compel national governments. Exchanging a small degree of sovereignty for greater national security may seem like a rational choice when threatened by diseases deadlier than COVID-19.
In such a transition, Brazil must again lead by example.
After all, its municipal and state governments pushed the dangerous Aedis aegypti mosquito out of its cities more than 100 years ago. More recently, Brazil's integrated approach to AIDS demonstrated how a country with fewer resources and higher levels of social inequality could beat a pandemic.
If we re-embrace the liberal ideals of open borders, cheap travel, and on-demand global supply chains, societies will need to make tough choices. We may commit to global and health regimes with international enforcement, increasing resources to national and international public health organizations, and expanding bio-surveillance with the sober recognition that every citizen or visitor is a potentially infectious body. This era of epidemics, like the previous one, must somehow balance security with liberty.

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The January 12, 1890, edition of the Paris satirical magazine Le Grelot depicted an unfortunate infl uenza sufferer bowled along by a parade of doctors, druggists, skeleton musicians and dancing girls representing quinine and antipyrine.