By Melody Li
Epidemics have always magnified the shortcomings of public health systems and revealed the vulnerability of the poor, says Brazil-based professor Marcos Cueto.
“The problems of society become more visible during epidemics,” Cueto told a UC Santa Barbara audience over Zoom last week. Cueto is an author, researcher, and professor of history of health at the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, an academic institute in Rio de Janeiro.
Hosted by the UCSB Latin American and Iberian Studies department, Cueto examined how contradictory and inadequate official responses to epidemics in Latin America have been an historical trend that has reappeared during the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Brazil-based historian Marcos Cueto discussed patterns of epidemics in Latin America that have reappeared during the current COVID-19 pandemic. The Zoom lecture was hosted by UCSB’s Latin American and Iberian Studies program.
“It’s a bad joke,” Cueto said, for governments to recommend hygiene practices and social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic when “clean water is a rare commodity for the poor.”
Instead of focusing on improving living conditions or health care systems, governments tend to place an overemphasis on technology to search for a quick fix that would rapidly stop the epidemic, he said.
With more than 378,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 23,500 deaths, Brazil is currently the second hardest-hit nation in the world, after the United States. Cueto described Brazilian President Jair Blosonaro’s “obsession” with chloroquine this spring as a search for a magic bullet to suddenly end the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Technology cannot be the only answer to an epidemic outbreak,” Cueto said.
This map shows number of COVID-19 cases in Latin America as compared to other countries. Graphic by BBC News.
During a malaria outbreak in the 1950s, countries focused on using insecticide to fumigate and kill mosquitoes instead of building houses to protect people from mosquitoes. “There is an assumption that disease can be controlled by a vaccine alone, without changes in living conditions,” Cueto said.
Epidemics have also revealed the weak efforts made by officials to build a universal health system. Latin American governments have created a policy environment in which ordinary people maintain very low expectations of public health, and fewer than 60% of Brazilians have access to healthcare. “It’s seen as a resource that might help them survive emergencies but not necessarily something that’s part of their lives,” Cueto said.
But members of the middle and upper classes are able to access private health systems, revealing an inequality between classes.
Although the COVID-19 outbreak in Brazil started among members of the middle and upper classes who had traveled to China and Europe, it is now affecting those in Brazil’s shanty towns and rural areas more. Similarly, the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s started in the United States but African countries suffered the most in the end.
“Poverty is apparently absent at the beginning of epidemics as they initially appear to attack rich and poor alike,” Cueto. said. “But after a while, it’s clear that the poor suffer more.”
Melody Li is a third-year communication and sociology double major at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social Media Intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.