This issue is in all the international news, however it is not much of an issue to the visitor and guest in Madagascar being this is a slum issue as mentioned above.
Here is another article but what I found interesting is the fleas are building up a resistance to the insecticide.
Madagascar is currently experiencing an outbreak of the plague, the disease once known as the Black Death, the World Health Organization announced recently.
The first case was reported in August. As of November 19, there have been 119 cases and 40 deaths.
The plague is spread among rodent populations by fleas, who can also infect humans. Symptoms include fever, chills, weakness, and swollen, painful lymph nodes. Usually, a bite from an infected flea leads to the bubonic plague, which can be treated with antibiotics. But if the bacteria enters the lungs, it can turns into pneumonic plague, a far deadlier version that can cause respiratory failure and spread person-to-person by coughing. Two percent of cases in the Madagascar outbreak have been pneumonic.
"The mortality rate depends on how soon treatment is started," the WHO notes, "but is always very high."
Of particular concern in the current outbreak is Antananarivo, Madagascar's capital and largest city, where two cases and one death have been reported already. "There is now a risk of a rapid spread of the disease due to the city’s high population density and the weakness of the healthcare system," the WHO warned in a press release, adding that the local flea population has developed a high resistance to deltamethrin, a popular insecticide.
Here is another website that lists a variety of concerns , such as Malaria, that can be found here and compared to
other countries.
[http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malaria/by-country/]
