Infections in Travelers Who Have Returned from Brazil

Brazil will host the World Cup games this summer and, in 2016, the Summer Olympics and Paralympics; some of the hundreds of thousands of international tourists who attend these events inevitably will become ill. Most U.S. primary care providers probably are quite rusty at constructing differential diagnoses for sick patients returning from that part of the world.

Researchers reviewed a large travel medicine database and identified presenting illnesses among more than 1500 U.S. travelers who visited Brazil between 1997 and 2013. The most common complaints were dermatologic conditions (40%), diarrhea (25%), and febrile systemic illness (19%).

Among those with skin complaints, the most common diagnosis was cutaneous larva migrans in 27%, followe…