BRAZIL PERSPECTIVE

Brazil breathed a sigh of relief after two days of uncertainty. The Jornada details the crisis cell: a man arrived in Brazil on May 22 with cough, chills, and diarrhea, hospitalized and diagnosed with malaria and negative for the Bundibugyo test; a 37-year-old patient who recently returned from the DRC, hospitalized in a grave state for meningitis with 'viral hemorrhagic fever', still under investigation. Both were in preventive isolation when the WHO and Tedros hailed the five first patients cured in Bunia. Brazilian press exhaled with the negative result — and highlighted it, as the country knows what a new health crisis would cost a hospital system that is still recovering from Covid.

It's the Estadão that delivers the most penetrating analysis of the international pool, in an editorial titled soberly 'The Ebola Alert'. The editorialist immediately posits that Bundibugyo 'will likely not cause the next pandemic' — not airborne, not as fast as Covid, and too deadly to travel easily. But it's precisely this that should alarm governments far beyond Central Africa. For weeks, the virus has circulated almost invisible in fragile regions. A third of the inhabitants of the affected areas do not even believe the disease exists, according to an ActionAid survey. Morgues are attacked, treatment centers too.

The editorial then pivots to the real Brazilian thesis: the world has emerged from Covid 'scientifically more capable but politically more fragmented'. International health aid collapsed last year, according to the OECD; the WHO pandemic treaty remains blocked on patents and access to vaccines; the United States has shifted to a 'transactional and suspicious approach to multilateralism'; public health itself has become an ideological battleground. And the Estadão concludes: 'The greatest risk may not be the next disease X. It's the temptation to believe that recent trauma has been enough to prepare us'. The tone is measured, erudite, almost European — it's a Brazilian voice speaking to the world, placing itself exactly at the intersection of the Souths.