The mosquito-borne virus killed a farm worker last week in a rural area of Misiones province, which borders Paraguay and Brazil, nine months after a tobacco worker died in the same area, the country’s first confirmed yellow fever fatality since 1966.

At least 2.5 million Argentineans risk exposure to the virus, said Misiones Governor Maurice Fabián Closs in a statement on the provincial health authority’s Web site.

Government efforts to fight the disease “will be relentless,” Closs said, adding that those who have resisted vaccination show an “alarming lack of awareness” of the dangers of yellow fever. Misiones has ordered 1.2 million shots to immunize all residents and those traveling to the province.

The Ministry of Health of the Nation is offering free vaccination at sites across the country to protect people against a disease the World Health Organization says can cause fatal bleeding and spark “devastating outbreaks.”

The Argentine cases add to a wave of infections in humans and monkeys in Brazil, Paraguay and Peru during the past 18 months, most of which were caused by infected mosquitoes circulating in jungle areas. In June, two deaths were confirmed in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s economic center, the country’s Center for Epidemiological Surveillance said.

Yellow Fever has reemerged as a public health threat during the past two decades, spurred by the spread of the Aedes mosquito capable of transmitting the viral disease, a reduction in vaccination rates, and increased global travel and urbanization, according to the WHO.

Fatal Hemorrhage

There is no specific treatment for the disease, which can cause fever, muscle ache and nausea. About one in seven sufferers develop severe complications, including hemorrhage and kidney failure, from which only half survive, the Geneva-based WHO said.

Yellow fever circulates mostly among monkeys in jungle, or sylvan, areas. It can cause outbreaks in humans when a person infected in the jungle travels to an urban area and is bitten by an Aedes egypti mosquito, which subsequently transmits the virus to other susceptible people whose blood it feeds on.

“There is always concern about a possible spill-over of the sylvan cycle of yellow fever virus transmission into the urban cycle involving Ae. egypti, as occurred last year in neighboring Paraguay,” the International Society for Infectious Diseases said yesterday in an e-mail via its ProMED-mail program.

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