Two Malaysian children have died after contracting rabies, the country’s first such deaths in almost two decades, as authorities battle a rare outbreak of the disease, officials said yesterday.
A six-year-old girl and her four-year-old brother died on Tuesday after becoming infected with the disease in a rural area on the Malaysian part of Borneo Island.
They were among three people confirmed to have been infected with rabies, which in most cases is transmitted via dog bites, Sarawak State Government and Sarawak Minister of Housing Sim Kui Hian (沈桂賢) said.
“Two of the three confirmed cases ... were pronounced dead,” Sim said.
“They were diagnosed to be brain dead and the parents have agreed for the life support to be withdrawn,” he said.
The other patient was still “critically ill,” he said.
Malaysian Director General of Health Noor Hisham Abdullah told reporters that the cases were the first rabies-related deaths in the nation in almost 20 years.
Five villages in the Serian District of Sarawak, which borders the Indonesian part of Borneo, are confirmed as having been affected by the outbreak.
The island of Borneo is shared between Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.
Sim said health teams in Serian had visited 19 villages as of Tuesday and carried out checks on more than 6,000 people.
Only three cases of humans contracting rabies had been confirmed.
Officials have ordered all dogs in the area to be vaccinated against rabies, state news agency Bernama reported.
Rabies causes inflammation of the brain and spinal cord and is almost always fatal once it has been contracted, according to the WHO.
It mainly affects poor people and vulnerable populations in rural areas, according to the WHO.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS