Yellow fever virus, interestingly, is more at home in the jungle with monkeys than it is with humans. Human infection is considered "incidental" by scientists. Yellow fever virus is spread by mosquitoes.
Recent scholarship by Oliveira Silva and colleagues (2020) looked at various aspects of the yellow fever outbreak in Brazil from 2016 to 2019, which they deemed the worst yellow fever outbreak in the area for 70 years. Here's a quick look at what insights came out of the outbreak:
- A new yellow fever virus strain was the culprit but its not clear whether it being a new strain made it worse than it would have been
- Most of the non-human primates infected with yellow fever virus during the period were of genus Alouatta (howler monkeys) or genus Callithrix (marmosets and tamarins); this fits with what's been seen in previous times
- Yellow fever did not appear to have spread in urban areas
A figure from the paper shows where yellow fever spread during this time. Blue indicates non-human primate transmission, gray indicates human transmission and red is both (see below).
Fortunately, there is a yellow fever vaccine that is considered to be safe and very effective, providing life-long immunity.
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