Malaria kills Italian girl

Rome, Sep 5 (IANS/AKI) A four-year-old Italian girl has died from malaria in the northern city of Brescia, possibly after being bitten by a mosquito, health officials said. The girl had never been outside Italy.

The gravely ill girl passed away at the main hospital in Brescia in the Lombardy region on Sunday after she was rushed there from the city of Trento in the Trentino-Alto Adige region, according to officials.

The hospital in Brescia was disinfected after the child's death and Italy's Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin has sent a team of experts to investigate the case.

The girl may have been bitten by a mosquito that previously bit another person who had contracted the illness abroad.

There were 3,633 malaria cases reported in Italy between 2011 and 2015 among which only seven were people who had not caught the disease abroad, the Health Ministry said.

In two cases, people were bitten by mosquitoes that flew out of a plane which landed at Rome's airport while in a third case the person was bitten by a mosquito that had been trapped inside a wooden mask imported from Africa.

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