City Mobilizes Against a Stubborn Health Threat: Mosquitoes (Apoorva Mandavilli & Alessandro Falco, NY Times, August 13, 2026)

From The New York Times:

City Mobilizes Against a Stubborn Health Threat: Mosquitoes   The city of Belém in northern Brazil was overwhelmed by an outbreak of dengue two years ago. An all-out municipal effort has reduced cases and may offer lessons to American cities.

Apoorva Mandavilli & Alessandro Falco, NY Times, August 13, 2026

It’s been 10 years, but Paulo Gomes still vividly remembers the terror he felt that his wife, Lucirene, would never return from the hospital, that she would die instead of the dengue she contracted from a mosquito bite, her body racked with fever and excruciating pain.

She did come home, after 15 days, and recovered fully after several more months. But the experience forever changed how Mr. Gomes thought about mosquitoes.

Mr. Gomes, now 65, is an eager participant in an aggressive campaign by Belém, the northern Brazilian city where he lives on the edge of a rain forest, to reduce mosquitoes and the health dangers they bring.

Municipal workers have counseled him that mosquitoes breed in standing water and thrive in musty, moist spaces. He fills the swimming pool in the backyard every Friday for his grandchildren who live nearby, but drains it religiously every Sunday after they leave.

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To keep mosquitoes away, Paulo Gomes drains his swimming pool at his home in Belém every Sunday after his grandchildren leave.

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A health worker from Belém’s health department replaced larvicide inside a dissemination unit at a home whose backyard abuts the Amazon rainforest.

He and his wife keep their veranda scrupulously clean and uncluttered, just a tricycle in one corner, a hammock in another — and, since last summer, a plastic bucket that is a centerpiece in Belém’s multipronged strategy against mosquitoes.

The size of a small trash can, it offers just the sort of dark, watery cavity a female mosquito might seek to lay eggs. But it contains larvicide, a chemical that kills young mosquitoes, and when she lands inside she becomes coated with it. When she flies away, she will spread it to other breeding sites, typically within a quarter-mile radius. Last year, Belém distributed 5,000 units in the parts of the city hit hardest by dengue.

At the moment, mosquitoes are a bigger menace in Belém and the rest of Brazil than in the United States or Europe, but the warming planet is expanding their range. Most cases of dengue, malaria and chikungunya in those places were contracted during travel abroad, but locally acquired cases are occurring more frequently. In 2024, the United States recorded nearly 3,800 cases of dengue, more than 100 of them locally acquired. About a third of the patients were hospitalized, and six died.

The climate crisis is a public health crisis,” Dr. Alexandre Padilha, Brazil’s health minister, said in an interview.

“It’s not a coincidence” that during its Group of 20 presidency, Brazil championed new initiatives to combat climate-driven diseases like dengue, Dr. Padilha said. “We have a lot to learn and also to teach many regions in the U.S.A. about how to face the impact of climate change,” he said.

A “mosquito factory” in Rio de Janeiro, where scientists produce mosquitoes containing bacteria that block dengue and other viruses.

Forged by bitter experience, Brazil has embraced new techniques to combat mosquitoes. Most of them are environmentally friendly, including building the world’s largest “mosquito factory,” a facility that produces mosquitoes containing Wolbachia, a bacterium that blocks dengue and other viruses. The Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes are then released in communities to breed and pass the bacteria to the next generation.

Tackling mosquitoes requires more than gee-whiz science. Municipal departments will need to beef up their vector control divisions and budgets, doctors must be trained to recognize and treat the diseases, and the general public will need education on protecting itself.

“It’s important for other countries to get ready for the possibility of having more and more cases happening, and train all the layers of the society,” said Luciano Moreira, the chief executive of Wolbito do Brasil, a joint venture between the nonprofit World Mosquito Program and the Brazilian government.

“It’s not just something like the government just goes there and sprays,” he said. “It’s part of a movement.”

A City Fights Back

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Belém, a gateway to the Amazon rainforest, is hot and humid year-round, making the city a haven for mosquitoes.Credit...Alessandro Falco for The New York Times

Locals like to say Belém has only two seasons — one in which it rains every day, and one when it rains all day.

The city is a gateway to the mighty Amazon, and it is edged by lush, muddy rainforest. Mango trees and their fallen fruit line the streets, luring insects with their sweet sticky scent. Small puddles of water — on the sidewalks, in stacked tires and in trash cans — offer mosquitoes the perfect nurseries to grow millions more of themselves.

A health worker discarding water from a larvicide dissemination unit in Belém, Brazil, last month.

A City Mobilizes Against a Stubborn Health Threat: Mosquitoes

The city of Belém in northern Brazil was overwhelmed by an outbreak of dengue two years ago. An all-out municipal effort has reduced cases and may offer lessons to American cities.

A health worker discarding water from a larvicide dissemination unit in Belém, Brazil, last month.

Credit.It’s been 10 years, but Paulo Gomes still vividly remembers the terror he felt that his wife, Lucirene, would never return from the hospital, that she would die instead of the dengue she contracted from a mosquito bite, her body racked with fever and excruciating pain.

Mr. Gomes, now 65, is an eager participant in an aggressive campaign by Belém, the northern Brazilian city where he lives on the edge of a rain forest, to reduce mosquitoes and the health dangers they bring..