María Luisa Ávila Agüero (born 30 January 1961) is a Costa Rican pediatric infectious disease specialist who was Minister of Public Health [es] during the administrations of Óscar Arias Sánchez (2006–2010) and Laura Chinchilla Miranda (2010–2014).

[2] Ávila resumed the program of vector-borne disease control, giving special emphasis to the fight against malaria, which had been abandoned by previous administrations and left in the hands of local levels of the Ministry of Health.

[4] On 20 March 2010, Ávila was part of a group of five ministers – together with Leonardo Garnier (Education), Roberto Gallardo [es] (Planning), Marco Vinicio Ruiz (Foreign Trade), and María Elena Carballo – to ask President Arias Sánchez to promote Bill 16.390 on "civil unions between people of the same sex".

[6] In June 2010, members of the PAC and PUSC filed a motion of censure against the Minister of Public Health for friction created after she ordered the closure of 40 offices in the Legislative Assembly's facilities that did not meet appropriate conditions.

[7] María Luisa Ávila presented her resignation from the Ministry of Public Health in July 2011 for differences with President Laura Chinchilla on the intervention process to seek solutions to various problems in the Department of Social Security.