Posted on 09/05/2017 11:39:08 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Sofia Zago died in Brescia on Sunday night, after being rushed to hospital with a high fever on Saturday.
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Sofia had been on holiday with her parents at Bibione, an Adriatic resort near Venice.
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Since the 1950s, Italy has not had a malaria problem because mosquito-infested marshes were drained.
There is speculation that Sofia might have caught malaria from one of two children treated for it at the Trento hospital after 15 August. They had caught it in Africa, and recovered.
Sofia had had treatment there for child diabetes and there was a break before her emergency readmission to the hospital at the weekend.
A Trentino health official, Paolo Bordon, said Sofia had not been in the same ward as the other two children. Sofia had not had a blood transfusion, he added, stressing that the treatments for malaria and diabetes were utterly different.
The Plasmodium Falciparum parasite carried by the Anopheles mosquito can kill a human within 24 hours.
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The latest case in northern Italy has baffled experts....
The European Centre for Disease Prevention Control closely monitors cases and has found a few cases of "locally acquired" malaria in the EU - two in France and three in Spain in 2014.
But there were explanations for how some of these might have occurred. One was a patient who had received a kidney from a donor with malaria; another was a newborn whose mother had recently returned from Equatorial Guinea.
One of the Spanish patients had no history of travel, but lived a few kilometres from a town where a "suitcase" malaria person lived. No infected local mosquitoes were found, but lab tests showed two people had an identical strain of the disease.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Disease probably carried into Italy by one of the many refugees from North Africa.
Africa just keeps on giving.
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I have never heard that one can ‘catch’ malaria...
She had to have been either bitten by a mosquito carrying the parasite or exposed to blood or body tissue infected with the parasite. It’s not a communicable disease so you’re correct, you don’t “catch” malaria from another person. You “catch” it from parasites carried by mosquitoes.
Seems, then, that it likely happened in the hospital...
That or some recent traveler to malaria endemic areas inadvertently brought back mosquitoes somehow, which sounds highly improbable but hey, tarantulas travel to strange places in crates of bananas all the time.
My grandmother grew up in the Tidewater, and suffered recurrent malaria as a child. I just looked it up and learned that malaria played a part in winning the Revolution ;-)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/18/AR2010101803877.html
Illegal Africans are the disease vector.
Bill Gates releasing mosquitoes again??
Baffled!!! I’m not. A Google search shows Africa and India as the “home” of malaria.
Duhhhhhhh! Letting them into your country is the reason.
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