Bad news: a case of measles has been confirmed in Hohenau. We had eradicated it in 1998, when the last infected child was registered.
We were the only country in the Southern Cone that had not reported cases of the condition, outbreaks of which are increasing around the world.
Since we have been doing things well in terms of vaccination and sanitary surveillance for a quarter of a century now, and almost no one has seen a case of measles, it is possible that many consider this reappearance irrelevant.
However, it is a highly contagious viral infection that mainly affects children and in certain cases can be complicated and even fatal.
There is no specific antiviral treatment. Two doses of the vaccine prevent disease, but global immunization coverage has been declining due in part to lack of access, but also to growing skepticism heightened by anti-vaccine movements during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr. Guillermo Sequera warned that coverage at the national level is declining steadily. Today only four out of ten children have applied the second dose. But he added something else: in the Itapúa area, where the aforementioned case appeared, there is a growing population of migrants from Eastern Europe that refuses to vaccinate for religious reasons or personal conviction. They are foreign communities with greater economic power than the local population and that “impose their own rules, without being interested in the rest,” he asserted.
In their countries, this refusal causes large outbreaks of measles that spread throughout Europe, only the robust state health structures in those parts keep the situation under control. But its expansion into Paraguay could be calamitous.
Reflecting on this subject has the inevitable bias of being branded as xenophobic or disrespectful of human rights. Far from me, those intentions.
Immigration is always welcome. I have always maintained that one of the cultural anchors that bind us to backwardness is our isolation from the world.
It happens that we are now witnessing a wave of immigrants from Germany and other openly denialist, anti-vaxxer and far-right countries. The issue has received more attention in the European press than in the local one, but it is evident that they have chosen Paraguay as the ideal refuge for those who dream of living without taxes, without health mandates, without Muslims, without 5G and without vaccines. Here, they suggest on European social networks, they will find the charm of anomie, of the lack of rules; something that overwhelms them in the supposed dictatorships from which they wish to escape.
Hundreds of these families settled in the area of Colonias Unidas and Colonia Independencia, places with a long tradition of European immigration, generating a true real estate bubble. They share an aggressive opposition to vaccines and frequent supremacist attitudes.
The other pole of settlement is the Paraíso Verde project, a kind of huge closed neighborhood of more than five hundred hectares located a few kilometers from Caazapá, administered by the Argentine-German Juan Buker, who became an influential Chartist leader of the department. This “autonomous community”, in which secrecy is the norm, is home to Germans and Austrians who are opposed to vaccination.
The reappearance of measles questions the health authorities about the need to return to the high vaccination rates of the past. The State must protect the general interest. Eradicating measles was an admirable and costly achievement for the Paraguayans. Ignorance and conspiracy fanaticism of this type of immigration cannot put the lives of our children at risk.
