Costa Rica, a popular Central American tourist draw, is fighting an outbreak of malaria on its east coast, authorities said.
Health officials carried out house-to-house checks on Saturday in Costa Rican Caribbean towns in search of malaria cases, after detecting an outbreak that has infected 60 people, the country’s authorities said.
At least 26 infections were detected in Limon, the largest Caribbean city in the country, and 32 in the neighboring canton of Pococi, located further north and bordering Nicaragua.
No deaths have been reported, although the disease can be fatal.
“Seventy-five percent of these cases were reported during the last two weeks,” Costa Rican Director of Health Monitoring Rodrigo Marin said.
It is impossible to know whether they had been brought in from abroad, he added.
Malaria, which is transmitted by mosquitoes in low-lying areas, is endemic in Costa Rica and other Latin American nations.
Symptoms include fever, chills, headache and muscle pain.
In 2021, “17 countries and one territory in the region of the Americas with endemic malaria accounted for 0.2 percent of malaria cases in the world,” according to a report released by the WHO in December last year.
There were about 600,000 cases and 334 deaths from malaria in the region last year. Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil together accounted for almost 79 percent of the total in the Americas, the report said.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
RSS