Disease in Ecuador

Here's something fascinating: Everybody in Ecuador still gets smallpox vaccines. I was noticing that lots of people have round scars on their upper arms but I didn't have confirmation of what it was until a couple nights ago when I asked one of my host family's daughters-in-law. She confirmed that it was indeed the scar from her vaccination for smallpox and that even the kids still get them here when they are born. I asked her how many people get the actual each year in Ecuador, and she guessed that it was about 100 (although it's impossible to tell, because the government does not release official figures about sick people), and that the number was similar in other South American countries. I told her that was surprising to me, since everyone in the States thinks that smallpox is completely gone from the world and the disease is almost forgotten there. But she confirmed that the scars were from vaccinations, and I looked up the Spanish word for smallpox ("viruela") to see if it has any other meanings, and I don't know of any other vaccines that leave similar scars, so I think it's legitimately true that smallpox is still a concern here. Even my host family in Quito confirmed that they also had the scars, but the Venezuelan guy who was also staying in my house said he didn't have one. So I'm not entirely sure how widely the vaccines are still administered. But I thought that it was fascinating and a little bit ominous that they are still administered here.

Apparently the vaccine has evolved a bit, though. The older generations (who all have the big scars like in the photo above) got the traditional two-pronged needle approach. But the little kids got theirs in the form of a standard injection and their scars are much smaller. I asked one of their mothers about it and she said that the vaccination now given is for three diseases: smallpox, polio, and something else that I don't have the translation for and can't remember the name of. To minimize the number of needle jabs, apparently, the nurses draw from each of the three vaccine vials in succession, so that the single shot contains vaccine for all three diseases, although it doesn't come pre-mixed.

The other exciting disease here is dengue. I didn't realize it was a problem until I was sitting in a cloud of mosquitoes with some other students one night and somebody started talking about it. For reference, dengue is a mosquito-borne disease with no vaccine or cure that, in its severe form, causes people to bleed severely internally. The rainy season is just ending and there are tons of mosquitoes everywhere on the island, but especially at the university where there's a perpetual pool of standing water right out front. Hopefully nobody gets sick!