What does “brote” mean in Spanish?

Un brote is the standard news word for a disease outbreak: un brote de ébola, un brote de gripe. The memorable part is its everyday meaning — a brote is the new shoot or bud a plant sends out, from the verb brotar, “to sprout.” So an epidemic is pictured as something budding and breaking out into the open, the same image English keeps in “outbreak.”

Brotar stretches naturally: water brota from a spring, tears brotan from your eyes, an idea brota in your mind. For scale, learners can stack brote (a local cluster) → epidemia (widespread in one region) → pandemia (across countries). In the clip it sits in formal reporting: continúa la alerta por el brote, “the alert over the outbreak continues.”