Falling ill and getting better

Near the end of the list sits o surto, and one Portuguese noun stands where English keeps two words that cannot be swapped. Um surto is what happens in a population — um surto de gripe na escola, um surto de sarampo — and for that English says « an outbreak ». Um surto is equally what happens inside one patient who already has a long-standing condition, the return of something that never quite left, which is the sentence printed in this list: teve um surto no inverno. English will not use « outbreak » there. « An outbreak » means a thing breaking out where it was not before, and it needs more than one body to be worth the word. The English here is « a flare-up », or the more clinical « a relapse » when the illness had gone quiet altogether. The test is to count the people. One person has a flare-up, a school has an outbreak, and a hospital can have both in the same week. Portuguese needs neither distinction, because the words around surto always say how many bodies are involved.