The objective of this paper is to recover the journalistic history of the visceral leishmaniasis epidemic that has been affecting the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, since 1993. It was pieced together from its chronological history, as well as from the narratives and discourses on the epidemic in 101 articles published by the mass media between 1993 and 1996. As regards methodology, the analysis relied on a proposal of Foucault's described in his 1972 work, "A Arqueologia do Saber" (The Archeology of Knowledge), and it highlights the existence of three major lines of discourse, which characterize thematic groups, in the subject matters studied, i.e., discourse produced by Science, by the State and by Society. Each one of them makes its own contribution as to how the illness is depicted in the journalistic universe, and puts forth its own views on these arenas. Thus, by studying journalistic texts, one can decipher another epidemic process that developed concurrently with the one affecting human beings and dogs, expressed in the narrative constructions on visceral leishmaniasis in newspaper articles.
leischmaniasis visceral; mass media; disease outbreaks