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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS