A four-year old girl has died of malaria after apparently
contracting the disease in northern Italy in a case that has perplexed the
medical world, doctors said Tuesday.
“I’ve never seen a case like it, it’s a mystery. It
shouldn’t have been possible for her to get malaria,” Claudio Paternoster, head
of the infectious diseases department at the Santa Chiara hospital in Trento,
told AFP.
The girl, named as Sofia Zago by the media, had not
travelled to any at-risk countries but had spent her summer holiday with her
family at the seaside in Italy’s Veneto region.
She had then been admitted for other health reasons to the
paediatric department of the Santa Chiara, where she had come into contact with
two children who had picked up malaria during a trip to Burkina Faso in Africa.
“But only some types of mosquito are able to transmit the
disease from person to person, and they don’t exist in Italy,” said
Paternoster, who was called to consult on Zago’s case over the weekend.
While there are a few cases of malaria in Italy a year,
“they are so-called ‘suitcase’ cases, where someone has brought an infected
mosquito back with them from Africa,” he said.
Zago was diagnosed with malaria on Saturday and transferred
to intensive care, but rapidly deteriorated on Sunday.
“It was a very hot summer and with climate change we cannot
rule out the adaptation of some species (of mosquito) or the re-introduction of
others” which could transmit the disease, Paternoster said.
Malaria was rife in Italy in the 19th century, particularly
in the centre, south and islands.
But after mass draining of marshlands and the widespread use
of the medicine quinine, by 1962 the country was declared malaria-free.
According to the World Health Organization, there were 212
million cases of malaria worldwide in 2015, and 429,000 deaths.
Ninety percent of malaria cases and deaths occur in Africa.
Children under five are most at risk.
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