Doctors left baffled after 4-year-old girl in Italy dies due to malaria – Read why

New Delhi: In a case that seems bizarre to doctors, a four-year-old girl in northern Italy died after contracting malaria – a region which is completely free of the disease.

Sofia Zago died in Brescia on Sunday night, after being rushed to hospital with a high fever on Saturday. The girl had never been outside Italy.

According to a report in BBC, Italy is free of the Anopheles mosquito that carries cerebral malaria, the deadliest form of the blood disease. But after a scorching August, some fear that it might have entered Italy.

It is believed that a flight could have brought it in.

There is speculation that Sofia might have caught malaria from one of two children treated for it at the Trento hospital after 15 August. They had caught it in Africa, and recovered.

Sofia had had treatment there for child diabetes and there was a break before her emergency readmission to the hospital at the weekend, BBC reported.

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.

(With IANS inputs)