Equine Encephalitis in Venezuela. A Clinical Epidemiological Profile of the 1995 Epidemic
Abstract
Equine encephalitis in Venezuela has presented itself in epidemic outbreaks in the Venezuelan Guajira since 1936. In 1938 the causal agent was isolated for the first time in a sick horse in Venezuela. The predominant syndrome is that of a self-limiting illness similar to the common cold, and only 4% of the people infected, principally children under 5 years of age, suffer encephalitis. Mortality in children under 5 with encephalitis is 35%. The clinical epidemiological profile of Equine encephalitis in Venezuela between July 15 and October 17 1995, is described and analyzed in relation to 5 municipalities: Maracaibo, Mara, Padilla, Paez, and Miranda in Zulia State. Data obtained from the epidemiological observance and control departments in Zulia is reviewed, including a total of 11,072 cases of clinical, epidemiological diagnosis of Venezuelan equine encephalitis in a population of 574,769 inhabitants in the five municipalities mentioned. The incidence of contagion is 1.92%, and there is no significant difference between sexes. The age group most affected is children under 5 years old, in which half of the mortality occurred (8 cases). This included 2 newborn children whose mothers contracted the disease in the last three months of pregnancy.
Copyright (c) 2003 José Luis Colina B, Gabriela Blanchard

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Kasmera journal is registered under a Creative Commons an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en; which guarantees the freedom to share-copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and adapt-remix, transform and build from the material, provided that the name of the authors, the Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, Zulia´s University and Kasmera Journal, you must also provide a link to the original document and indicate if changes have been made.
The Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, University of Zulia and Kasmera Journal do not retain the rights to published manuscript and the contents are the sole responsibility of the authors, who retain their moral, intellectual, privacy and publicity rights. The guarantee on the intervention of the manuscript (revision, correction of style, translation, layout) and its subsequent dissemination is granted through a license of use and not through a transfer of rights, which represents the Kasmera Journal and Department Infectious Diseases, University of Zulia are exempt from any liability that may arise from ethical misconduct by the authors.
Kasmera is considered a green SHERPA/RoMEO journal, that is, it allows self-archiving of both the pre-print (draft of a manuscript) and the post-print (the corrected and peer-reviewed version) and even the final version (layout as it will be published in the journal) both in personal repositories and in institutional and databases.