Yellow fever alert

Brazil has launched a mass vaccination campaign for yellow fever in the southern states, where the disease has killed more than 220 people as well as countless numbers of howler monkeys.

Large portions of Brazilian rain forest in Minas Gerais state are now left without a single monkey.

“It was just silence, a sense of emptiness,” University of Wisconsin anthropologist Karen Strier said after visiting the affected region.

Scientists say they are alarmed at the speed at which the mosquito-borne disease is spreading across the landscape, jumping from one patch of forest to another.