TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - In a ward usually reserved for juvenile burn victims, children lay listlessly under mosquito nets next to worried parents. On a recent day, 9-year-old Carlos Bentez was headed home after enduring several days of intravenous fluids while doctors waited for his dengue fever to break.
But Dr. Sara Hernndez, who supervised the ward at the University School Hospital, knew the bed would immediately be filled, just as all the beds have been since the ward opened in June amid a deadly epidemic of the mosquito-spread virus.
At least 135 people have died from dengue this year in Honduras, nearly two-thirds of them children. Many other suspected deaths await lab confirmation. Honduras already has by far the highest death rate from dengue in Latin America this year, and the country's most prevalent strain also happens to be the most aggressive and the deadliest.
The epidemic hit a country roiled by social unrest and led by a president who has lacked credibility since he won another term in spite of a constitutional ban on his re-election in 2017. Juan Orlando Hernndez has also been named a co-conspirator in his brother's U.S. drug trafficking case. Doctors and nurses spent weeks marching against his proposed reforms, which they feared were a step toward privatizing the country's health care system.
A level of complacency also existed among the population after five years in which there were only 16 dengue deaths. But that's often the way the virus acts - a few years of calm followed by a big outbreak.
As a region, Central America and Mexico have already recorded nearly double the number of dengue cases as the entire previous year. Guatemala, Mexico and Nicaragua have seen double-digit death tolls.
The last time this many people in Central America and Mexico died from dengue was 2013, according to data compiled by the Pan American Health Organization. That year, Mexico accounted for the majority of the dead with 192.