UNITED NATIONS – World leaders gathered at the United Nations heard dire warnings and desperate pleas for assistance Thursday as the deadly Ebola virus forced Sierra Leone to quarantine a million people.
Employees at 345 hotels across Costa Rica are conducting cleaning campaigns in their communities to eliminate potential breeding sites for mosquitoes that transmit the dengue and chikungunya viruses. The good news is that the number of dengue cases has dropped by 79 percent this month compared to the same period last year.
"We are so much at the breaking point," said Joanne Liu, international director for the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders. "My people are telling me, 'We don't know how much longer we're going to last.' "
"What I wasn't prepared for," Roland Griffiths says, "is people would come in two months later and I would say, 'Well, so what do you think of the experience?' And they'd say ... 'It was one of the most important experiences in my life.' "
According to the Costa Rican Red Cross, August was the most violent month so far this year, with 102 deaths in "tragic circumstances," a term the agency uses in statistics to refer to both homicides and accidents. The report was released on Tuesday.
Tim Callaghan and Phil Gelman were both involved in relief efforts in one of the most high-profile, horrific disasters in the Western Hemisphere in the last five years: the Haiti earthquake and cholera outbreak in 2010.
The declaration by the World Health Organization on Friday of the outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa as an international public emergency prompted local health officials to implement a series of measures to prevent the possible spread to Costa Rica.
Health Ministry officials will ask the National Emergency Commission (CNE) to issue a "green alert" to draw attention to the spread of chikungunya after 13 patients tested positive for the virus in the country.
Health officials are analyzing blood samples from a 17-year-old man and 30-year-old woman who could become the first two cases of Costa Ricans to test positive for the chikungunya virus.
