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Gregorio presents the clbadic symptoms of malaria, a disease that was eradicated many years ago from his Yukpa indigenous people, but he is back with a vengeance throughout Venezuela hit by the crisis.
"He had pain in his joints and started vomiting, and it's been four or five days since he ate anything," said his worried wife, Marisol.
Their four-month-old baby babbles near his father on the bed.
"The baby and I also had malaria," says Marisol. "Before, it was not the case here, there was only chikungunya and dengue, malaria came back here last year."
She does not smile at the mention of one of the other viruses transmitted by mosquitoes, whose spread was fueled by the collapse of Venezuela's health system.
"Here" is El Tucuco, a small village located at the foot of the mountains that form the border with Colombia, three hours drive from Maracaibo, in the state of Zulia, in western Venezuela.
With its 3,700 inhabitants, El Tucuco is the "capital" of Yukpas and malaria quickly makes its presence felt here as in the rest of Venezuela – a country that could boast of having been the first to stay in the country. eradicate in 1961.
& # 39; Pandemic & # 39;
There are no official statistics on the extent of malaria in El Tucuco, nor on the number of deaths that it causes.
But from his consulting office at the Catholic Mission, Dr. Carlos Polanco sees a crisis developing.
"Of 10 people tested for malaria in the village laboratory, four to five have a positive test.This is an alarming figure."
Brother Nelson Sandoval, a Capuchin Friar who presides over the mission, adds: "Before I went into the order, I already knew this community and I had never seen a case of malaria. In the middle of a pandemic. "
El Tucuco is affected by Plasmodium vivax, the most widely spread malaria in the world. The deadliest strain of Plasmodium falciparum is widespread in the Amazonian regions of southeastern Venezuela.
According to Sandoval and Polanco, the cause of the sudden virulence of malaria in El Tucuco is simple: once-regular fumigation missions by the Venezuelan government have been halted.
"And with the increase in the mosquito population, cases have exploded," Polanco said.
Added to this is the malnutrition that weakens the resistance to the disease, a new phenomenon since the economic crisis settled in late 2015.
"Before, it was possible to vary its diet, but with inflation, the Yukpa do not have the means," content with what they can cultivate, such as cbadava and plantain , according to Polanco.
Rosa, 67, knows everything about malnutrition. Lying on the floor of her house, she is fighting for the third time against malaria. "The doctor weighed me yesterday – 37 kg, I already had 83 kg."
A report published in the British medical journal The Lancet in February warned of an epidemic of malaria and dengue fever due to the persistent crisis in Venezuela.
Between 2016 and 2017 alone, the number of malaria cases in the country has increased by 70%.
"The situation is catastrophic," said Dr. Huniades Urbina, secretary of the National Academy of Medicine. In 2018, "there were 600,000 cases of malaria and we, scientific organizations, estimate that in 2019 we could reach a million cases," or one in every 30 people.
But these figures are only estimates, "because the government hides the statistics".
& # 39; Nobody answers us
The explosion of malaria has gone hand in hand with the worsening of the economic crisis. According to the government of Nicolas Maduro, the inflation rate reached 130,000% in 2018 and the GDP was halved between 2013 and 2018.
In the oil-rich Zulia state, service stations have been dry for more than a month. Power outages are commonplace and residents flee abroad by the thousands.
Despite a poster of the late President Hugo Chavez at the entrance of the clinic, the government's presence in El Tucuco is weak. Luisana Hernandez is desperate to never have seen the help of the state.
"Every day everything is getting a little worse," she says exasperatedly. The refrigerators used to keep the vaccines cold do not work "because we do not have gasoline to run the generator", and the two broken down ambulances in the clinic are rusting in the air. the garden.
"We knocked on every door but no one answers us," Hernandez said.
Without fuel to carry the city's medicines, without resources to prevent disease, eradicate malaria in an almost impossible task.
Brother Nelson does what he can, with the help of Caritas Catholic Charity and the Pan American Health Organization. Its mission distributes chloroquine and primaquine antimalarials to the sick Yukpa people.
Maria Jose Romero, 22, was able to benefit from treatment. "The repeated seizures are due to the fact that many people can not follow the treatment," she added.
Romero now lives on the other side of the Colombian border after fleeing Venezuela. She is visiting El Tucuco to see her family. Soon she will return to the other side of the mountain, on foot.
"It's three days of walking," she says.
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