Mon, Jul 08, 2019 page5

• FEATURE: Once eradicated, malaria surges back in Venezuela amid economic collapse

  • AFP, EL TUCUCO, Venezuela
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  The sweltering heat of the Venezuelan forest made no difference to Jose Gregorio, who trembled with a cold chill.

  “I have pain everywhere, fever,” he stammered.

  Gregorio had the classic symptoms of malaria, a disease eradicated years ago among his Yukpa indigenous people, but it is back with a vengeance all across crisis-struck Venezuela.

  

  A Yukpa girl drinks a dietary supplement provided by the Caritas organization at Los Angeles del Tukuko mission in El Tucuco, Venezuela, on June 12.

  Photo: AFP

  “He had sore joints and then started vomiting, and it’s been four or five days since he’s eaten anything,” said his worried wife, Marisol.

  Their four-month-old baby babbled beside his father on the bed.

  “The baby and I also had malaria,” Marisol said. “Before, that was not the case here, there was only chikungunya and dengue, malaria came back here last year.”

  She did not bat an eyelid at the mention of either of the other viruses, whose spread has been fueled by the collapse of Venezuela’s health system.

  “Here” was El Tucuco, a small village at the foot of the mountains that form the border with Colombia, a three-hour drive from Maracaibo in Venezuela’s western Zulia State.

  With 3,700 people, El Tucuco is the Yukpas’ “capital” and malaria is rapidly making its presence felt there as in the rest of Venezuela — a country that could once boast of being the first to have eradicated the disease in 1961.

  There are no official statistics on malaria’s reach into El Tucuco, nor on the number of deaths it causes.

  However, from his consulting room at the Catholic Mission, Carlos Polanco was seeing a developing crisis.

  “Out of 10 people who are tested for malaria in the village laboratory, four to five come out with a positive test. This is an alarming figure,” he said.

  Nelson Sandoval, a Capuchin friar who presides over the mission, said: “Before entering the order, I already knew this community and I had never seen a case of malaria. Today we are in the middle of a pandemic.”

  El Tucuco is affected by Plasmodium vivax, the most geographically widespread malarial species. The more lethal Plasmodium falciparum strain is prevalent in the Amazonian regions of southeastern Venezuela.

  According to Sandoval and Polanco, the reason for malaria’s sudden virulence in El Tucuco is simple: Once-regular fumigation missions by the government stopped.

  “And as the population of mosquitos increased, cases exploded,” Polanco said.

  Added to this is the malnutrition that weakens resistance to the disease, a new phenomenon since the economic crisis took hold at the end of 2015.

  “Before, it was possible to vary one’s diet, but with inflation the Yukpa cannot afford it,” instead making do with what they can grow, like cassava and plantain, Polanco said.

  Rosa, 67, knew all about malnutrition. Lying on the floor of her house, she was battling malaria for the third time.

  “The doctor weighed me yesterday — 37 kilograms. I was 83 kilos before,” she said.

  Between 2016 and 2017 alone, the number of malaria cases in the nation jumped 70 percent.

  “The situation is catastrophic,” said Huniades Urbina, secretary of the national Academy of Medicine.

  Last year, “there were 600,000 cases of malaria and we, the scientific organizations, estimate that in 2019 we could reach a million cases” — one in every 30 people.

  However, these figures are only estimates, “because the government conceals the statistics,” he said.

  The malaria explosion has gone hand in hand with the worsening economic crisis.

  Inflation last year reached a staggering 130,000 percent and GDP halved from 2013 to last year, government figures showed.

  Physician Luisana Hernandez despaired of ever seeing any state help.

  “Every day, everything is deteriorating a bit more,” she said.

  Refrigerators intended to keep vaccines cold do not work “because we have no gasoline to run the generator” and the clinic’s broken-down ambulances were rusting in the garden.

  “We’ve knocked on every door, but nobody answers us,” Hernandez said.

  Without fuel to bring drugs from the city, without resources to prevent illnesses, eradicating malaria in an almost impossible task.

  Nelson does what he can, with help from the Catholic charity Caritas and the Pan American Health Organization. His mission distributes the antimalarial drugs chloroquine and primaquine.

  Maria Jose Romero, 22, was able to benefit from treatment.

  “Many people cannot follow the treatment” for lack of drugs, she said.

  Romero lives across the border in Colombia, having fled Venezuela.

  She was visiting El Tucuco to see her family. Soon she would return to the other side of the mountain, on foot.

  “It’s three days’ walk,” she said.
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