She asked the communities to take responsibility for keeping them clean of the breeding places of the transmitter of this arboviral disease, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, Teletica channel added.

Most of the nearly 15,000 patients reported by the Costa Rican Social Security Fund were diagnosed in hospitals in the northern region of Alajuela, the southwestern region of Puntarenas and the capital city of San José, where the minister expressed special emphasis.

Health authorities ordered the fumigation of half a million homes with suspected contagion and the revision of containers and spaces susceptible to host the larvae of the mosquitoes, the television station said.

The Ministry of Health announced the diagnosis of six cases of severe dengue fever in the national territory, although no deaths have been reported, but recalled that at regional level there are 5,436 deaths due to this cause, 103 of them in Central America.

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