Health

El «tío COVID», un hombre que sobrevivió tras ser enterrado en un cementerio colectivo secreto de Iquitos se ha convertido en un símbolo macabro del desastre en que se vio sumida la ciudad de Iquitos, en la Amazonía peruana, donde el 70% de los habitantes habían sido infectados por el COVID-19 en julio de 2020. Un sistema sanitario decrépito, una aguda falta de oxígeno médico, la pobreza, la corrupción de las élites locales y el poder de las bandas criminales conspiraron para agravar esta catástrofe.

'Uncle Covid', a man who survived interment at a secret mass-burial site in Iquitos, has become a macabre symbol of the disaster that engulfed the Peruvian Amazonian city of Iquitos, where 70 per cent of the inhabitants had been infected with Covid-19 by July 2020. A decrepit health system, an acute lack of medical oxygen, poverty, the corruption of local elites and the power of criminal gangs conspired to aggravate this catastrophe.

Venezuelan migrants having crossed the Darien Gap nurse their wounds in Guatemala while planning the final leg of their journey north.

Alberto Gil makes sense of a new layered crisis in Cuba shaped by the pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Caribbean country's internationally lauded healthcare system, a new generation in power and a new culture of dissent.

Covid-19 has caused untold damage in Latin America. The region accounts for almost a third of Covid-19 deaths despite making up less than 10...

Venezuela, once a 'good example' for malaria control is now facing an epidemic of infections, fuelled by mining, deforestation, poverty and violence, especially in the Arco Minero around Sifontes

Chile's current 'Three Grounds' abortion law is proving inadequate in practice. Lack of public information, the 14-week limit and medical staff 'conscientious objection' opt outs all lead to many unwanted pregnancies and dangerous illegal abortions. The incoming Boric government is being urged to reform the law.

Hundreds of tons of carcinogenic agrochemicals, including DDT, were abandoned by the Brazilian government at a factory near an orphanage on the outskirts or...

Why did Peru suffer 200,000 deaths in a population of less than 33 million?

In an urgent and impassioned statement, Haiti Support Group warns that the country's 'apparent fragility to "natural" disaster is no accident. The world made it that way. What the country needs now, desperately, is solidarity, not charity.