El Salvador, Dengue Sparks Yellow Alert
The El Salvador Health Ministry Thursday extended the yellow alert to several localities due to the threat of possible dengue epidemics.

Ricardo Lara, director of the Health Fund, said the alert was issued Wednesday in the capital and was now extended to the populations in the western department of Sonsonate.

According to the official, 72 percent of those affected live in San Salvador, Sonsonate and La Libertad and the emergency measure is both a reaction of the healthy system and an embarkation on measures of prevention.

He noted that the Salvadoran people are willing to cooperate with reducing the habitats of the increasing numbers of Aedes Aegypti mosquito larva; the Aedes Aegypti is the main transmitter of the disease.

Until Wednesday evening, 2,435 people had been reported with classic dengue and another 76 with the hemorrhagic variant of the disease, while suspicions of possible infection point at some thousands.

Health Minister Guillermo Maza stressed the seriousness of the matte,r surpassing levels established with the statistics on outbreaks reported during the last five years.