WHEN ANGOLAN JOURNALIST and human rights activist Rafael Marques de Morais visited a morgue in the city of Luanda in March, he saw 235 bodies being carried out in five hours. The crowded Angolan capital, chaotic at the best of times, was in the throes of a massive outbreak of yellow fever and malaria, and by Marques’s account, it was hard to say who was dying of what. “People died of one disease, and [hospital staff] would write down another,” he says.
Angola has been grappling with its worst yellow fever outbreak in three decades, a crisis that the World Health Organization (WHO) recently warned “constitutes a potential threat for the entire world.” The big fear is it could spread to China, which has been free of the virus, if Chinese workers return home sick, and supply of the vaccine is already under pressure.
At least 250 yellow fever deaths and nearly 2,000 cases have been reported in Angola since December, but Marques and others think the numbers are higher. The epidemic took hold in the densely populated capital of Angola, where the global collapse in oil prices led to spending cuts on public health and sanitation that, along with unusually heavy rains, created a fertile environment for the deadly virus’s favorite transmitter, the Aedes aegypti mosquito.