In his 20 years cleaning the Buenos Aires subway, Mauricio Ríos, 52, has never seen anything like this: a large and noisy swarm of mosquitoes churning in dark clouds along the length of the platform at Piedras station.
Ríos pulled out his phone and filmed the growing swarm for half a minute, before rushing to the break room, contacting his chief and locking down the station.
“Mostly in the summer, bugs come down here, attracted by the light, but never in such enormous numbers,” Ríos said. “They reappeared the next day. I have no idea what is going on. And from what I’ve seen in the news, it’s not the only place.”
His video quickly went viral as Argentina endure an unprecedented mosquito outbreak, which has been blamed for a rise in dengue, an infectious disease spread by the Aedes aegypti species.
According to the Ministry of Health, 74,555 cases of dengue have been registered in the country since the beginning of the year, a whopping 2,153% higher than the same period in 2023. Forty-seven people have died from it in 2024, and health officials expect cases will continue in the coming weeks.
Dengue’s symptoms include headaches, high fever, vomiting, muscle and joint pains, pain behind the eyes and a skin rash. Sometimes – especially for those who have been infected more than once – dengue can be severe and lead to death.
According to the head of Córdoba University’s Center for Tropical Diseases, epidemiologist Hugo Pizzi, the outbreak is caused by a rise in the country’s temperatures – a phenomenon he calls “tropicalisation” – along with an increase in off-season rain.
“It’s the perfect formula for spreading mosquitoes,” he said. Pizzi added that mosquitoes are now appearing in the country’s southern provinces, a region where they were unthinkable 25 years ago, due to human-caused climate change.
Even though mosquitoes bite people regardless of social class, protection is becoming increasingly expensive, as the price of mosquito repellent has risen 170% since December, when the country’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, devalued the peso by 54% and eliminated all price controls . . A 290 ml spray can costs a minimum of 3,620 pesos ($4 at the official rate, $3.60 at the informal rate).
In April last year, Argentina’s health authorities approved a dengue vaccine produced by Japan’s Takeda laboratory that protects against all four dengue serotypes, but its price means it is far from accessible to most people in the country. The government currently has no plans to make the vaccine widely available because it believes more trials are needed, according to a spokesperson for the health ministry.
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Milei’s government blamed the previous administration for the outbreak, saying former President Alberto Fernández had failed to educate the public about the risk. Milei’s campaign manager Fernando Cerimedo also suggested on X that Bill Gates intentionally released the mosquitoes to harm the new government and profit from the dengue vaccines, without providing any evidence.
Pizzi said many Argentines still do not take the dire situation seriously, and called on people to clean their yards, eliminate excess water, cut the grass and weeds and protect their children with mosquito nets. “Little children are defenseless,” he said.
In January, a three-month-old child died of dengue in the northern province of Misiones.
Pizzi called on Argentina’s government – and its population in general – to fight harder against dengue and the insect that carries it. “We cannot be intimidated by a mosquito, by such a small creature,” he said.
