Humane Society International and Costa Rica’s Servicio Nacional de Salud Animal (SENASA) will hold a signing ceremony for a memorandum of understanding to collaborate in the improvement of companion and farm animal welfare on Monday, Oct. 22. An official SENASA and HSI training session on dog fighting issues will follow the ceremony. WHEN: Monday, Oct. 22 at 9:00 a.m. WHERE: Hotel C...

Historically, the best place to get fruits, vegetables, and other locally grown/made products near Escazu, has been at the Escazu Central farmers market, on the street just above the Catholic Church every Saturday morning. But if you want to try something new, we recommend Bodega Verde at Avenida Escazu every Saturday from 9am to 2pm. The food products are hand picked to be the absolute be...

Chronic kidney disease has killed tens of thousands of young men and is becoming more deadly. But nobody knows exactly what it is, or what to do about it. It is stage five they fear the most. Stage five is the mysterious sickness in its deadliest form. "I'm entering stage five," Edilberto Mendez tells me as his wife looks on fretfully. I'm in their small home on the floodplains of Lempa Riv...

In the past The Costa Rica Star has reported on Costa Rican scientists working towards a cure for cancer. Experts from Costa Rica and the Spanish company PharmaMar, dedicated to marine biotechnology research, beginning in February will seek new cures and treatments for cancer in organisms living in Costa Rican waters. The Spanish company will work for five years in the territorial waters...

In the past The Costa Rica Star has published about cage free egg choices in Costa Rica. Humane Society International encourages Costa Rica consumers to take steps to improve the treatment of egg-laying hens in conventional egg production. Costa Rica has approximately three million egg-laying hens, many confined in barren battery cages. In these small wire cages, each hen spends practica...

Pictured above is the Fer De Lance Snake, one of the regions most deadly. Although the production of antivenom is at normal levels, an unexplained over demand is causing severe shortages, which worry farmers, its main consumers, who are requesting the drug’s importation. Veterinary antivenom produced in Costa Rica is produced by the Clodomiro Picado Institute, whose director Alberto Al...

Under a joint programme promoted by Cuba and Venezuela, more than 17 million people from Latin American countries have had free eye surgery since 2004, the Prensa Latina news agency reported. A total of 17,596,388 eye surgeries have been performed under the "Mission Miracle" programme. The figure includes more than 1,433,000 people from Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemal...

The state's national ombudsman, Ofelia Taitelbaum, started the process, saying "people will understand that this is about rights" that are appropriate for "our times." In the worldwide debate over abortion and women's rights, this might seem like an unusual law. After all, in-vitro fertilization actually creates life. But Costa Rica is heavily Catholic; more than 76 percent of its people id...

In some countries political campaigns give out bumper stickers and yard signs. In others, they offer free lunches and supermarket debit cards. In Honduras, one of Latin America’s poorest countries and also its most dangerous, candidates dole out another type of political swag: coffins for the destitute. Charities organized by politicians scour poor neighborhoods in search of families of mur...

The populations of Latin America and the Caribbean are aging faster than those of developed countries and a fourth of the region’s population will be over 60 by 2005, according to a report published Monday by the United Nations Population Fund. The number of over-60s is estimated to triple from 63.1 million now, or 10 percent of the total population, to 187 million in a span of 38 years. ...

Graduates of Cuba’s Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina, or ELAM, are “gravely deficient” in their preparation to practise medicine, the head of Costa Rica’s most celebrated medical school told journalists last month. Of the 138 graduates who failed the medical licensing exams in Costa Rica, 59 were graduates of ELAM, said Ricardo Boza Cordero, director of the medical programme at the Unive...

The death of nearly 300 people from medicine provided by Panama’s Social Security Fund (CSS) reverberated around the world, but no one has taken the blame. Now the Committee of Relatives for the Right to Health and Life (Cofadesavi) is calling for the head of the current CSS director. "The president and the board of the Social Security Fund should take action on the matter and call for t...

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved $56.2 million in financing to Nicaragua for a program to improve health care, benefitting some 2.3 million people living in vulnerable areas. The funds will finance the construction and rehabilitation of 80 health care centers as well as the integration of the health system’s clinical and management areas in seven targeted local systems (SILAI...

Tortillas for Tepecoyo works to fight hunger in and form relationships with the rural community of Tepecoyo, El Salvador. The newly formed group hopes to help support the comedor, similar to a soup kitchen, in La Javia, Tepecoyo through communication and donations. The comedor in Tepecoyo was created and is maintained by a local woman named Angelica Portillo. “’Tortillas is an opportunit...

Retiring to Nicaragua does not have to mean that people’s healthcare will suffer, especially if they are going to be moving close to the capital city Managua and other major cities. Healthcare is very good in Nicaragua and it is also less expensive than it is in the United States. Therefore, people have the opportunities to maintain their health even if they move out of the States and retire i...

Dressed as a man, the sixth-grade teacher leaves school and walks several blocks through a dangerous red-light district overrun with gangs and crack dealers. Arriving at a friend's home, a transformation begins. Off come wide-leg jeans, T-shirt and a baseball cap that hides long hair. After an extensive, two-hour makeup session, Linda Elizabeth Tylor Martinez emerges wearing a miniskirt and...

The Costa Rica Star has previously reported on Dengue Fever in Costa Rica and the Minister of Health addressing the concerns. A total of 8,480 people have been affected by dengue fever in Costa Rica, marking a year-on-year increase of 36 percent, showed an official report released Monday. The report from the Costa Rican Health Ministry said that the percentage represented an increase of ...

This year, I am homeschooling my three children, ages 10, 7 and 5, on an extended international adventure. We moved to a remote coast, accessible only by boat, on the south shore of Utila, a small island off the coast of Honduras. We are here for my husband's work, but also to immerse ourselves in a different reality, a real-life experiment about living with less and experiencing more. We have...

Acciona SA (ANA), the Spanish company that plans to build a desalination facility in Chile’s Atacama desert, said today that it will construct and operate the biggest wastewater treatment plant in Costa Rica. Acciona Agua’s $45 million project will serve at least 1 million people in the Costa Rican capital, or about two-thirds of San Jose’s population on completion, the company said in a ne...

The Governments of the United States and Brazil today formalized a partnership with the Government of Honduras to increase agriculture production, decrease undernutrition, and promote renewable energy in Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. “By leveraging the joint expertise of the United States and Brazil we have an opportunity to help Hondurans rise out of pov...

The Costa Rica Star previously reported on the Albinos of Kuna Panama. Megan Leavitt, 29, is a self-described nomad. “I’ve been traveling for the last 12 years,” she said. Her travels have taken her from Glenburn, where she grew up; to Santa Cruz and the University of California where she earned a degree, on full scholarship, in Latin American and Latino studies; to Haiti; Mexico; Centra...

The U.S. Embassy called to say the Guatemalan government would begin to authorize adoptions five years after a scandal froze the system that sent as many as 4,000 Guatemalan children a year to the United States. Ryan "Bubba" Hooker and his wife, Jess, might finally be able to collect the little boy they wanted to adopt and bring him home. But Hooker wasn't sure. This would be his 36th tr...

A group of volunteers in St. Cloud is making a deep impact on the health of people in developing countries – and they could use a hand. The MESSAGE Program was started 12 years ago by Karin Reichensperger, who after traveling to Guatemala, saw a need for things like medical, emergency and fire equipment. Over time, the organization gained donated warehouse and office spaces to expand the...

Twitter's former VP of Communications, Sean Garrett, just returned from three months in Costa Rica. His wife quit her job as an up-and-coming financial executive for the trip. Naturally, the experience was amazing -- so amazing that Garrett thinks everyone should make it a priority to take a three month leave of absence to a tropical paradise. "I know what you are thinking. I can’t do...

Obtaining the appropriate health permits for Mexico enables Costa Rican producers to export more than 40,000 tons of eggs. The outbreaks of avian influenza in the Aztec country motivated the sacrifice of 11 million birds, causing Mexican authorities to lift all restrictions on the importation of eggs, in order to meet domestic demand. An article in Nacion.com reports that "the National...

The tiny Central American country of Belize is making plans to offer more than Maya Ruins, sun and sand to visitors as it prepares to launch a medical tourism infrastructure a release today from the Belize Trade and Investment Development Service says. In early August 2012, a workshop on medical tourism was coordinated, with the objective to create awareness of the new industry and to deter...

Five headless bodies, including those of four young women, were found over the weekend in the Caribbean port city of La Ceiba, a Honduran National Police spokesman said. The bodies were found in trash bags Saturday in a street in Rio Viejo, a community located near the Cangrejal River in La Ceiba, National Police spokesman Jose Lainez said. The unidentified victims, who range in age from...

There is a brewing controversy in the schools of Costa Rica over some of the proposed changes to the school curriculum, specifically dealing with sexual education. In a recent statement the Bishops of Costa Rica denounced and heavily criticized a new sexual education curriculum that was recently approved by the Costa Rican government. They claimed that the new school curriculum promotes a "...

In spite of protection measures by the Guatemalan Government, many children are still victims of sexual exploitation and forced labour, a United Nations independent expert warned today. “Many children are still victims of sexual exploitation and forced labour in Guatemala despite the laudable efforts carried out to prevent and combat the sale of children for illegal adoption,” said the Spec...

The Sea Turtle Restoration Programme (Pretoma) and the Citizen Action Party (PAC) requested the Ministry of Foreign Trade (Comex) to ban the entry of shark fins from Nicaragua. According to reports provided by the Costa Rican Institute of Fishing and Aquaculture (Incopesca), between June, 2011 and July, 2012 about 500 kilograms of dried shark fins entered Costa Rican public piers from Nicar...

Cycling is a great way to get to know the world from a unique perspective. You are close enough to the open road to really experience the place you’re travelling in, but it’s quicker than walking and easier to pack the things you need to keep you going on a long journey. One great cycle ride is the journey from Costa Rica to Panama, which gives cyclists a chance to get to know first had on...

The impact of poor dental health is greatest among children in Guatemala. Due to an increased risk of long-term damage from poor dental hygiene as their permanent teeth grow in, children are a critical factor in breaking the cycle of poor dental health. In partnership with Procter & Gamble and their Oral-B brand, Fondo Unido de Guatemala (United Way in Guatemala) is working to improve ...

President Chinchilla has learned about advances in the digitization of health services from Korean authorities, and urged the Social Security Institute to seek advice on the subject. An opinion piece in Nacion.com details that "after visiting a hospital in Korea, where she could observe the benefits of electronic medical records, President Laura Chinchilla was frankly impatient with the S...

Nearly two dozen people ran through the night in Spruce Grove to help support children in Nicaragua. The event was a part of The Good Run, spearheaded by Matt Blacklock, who was aiming to run 200 kilometres in 24 hours to raise money to build a school for 1,000 kids in Managua, Nicaragua. Blacklock ran in a Good Run event in the Canadian Rockies back in 2011, and decided to bring the eve...

Aqueducts and Sewers (AyA) indicated that in December 2015 the project for wastewater treatment will be completed in the Greater Metropolitan Area (GAM), despite delays in the execution of the work. Rafael Barboza, director of environmental improvement for the project, said the project has a total cost-to-date of $321 million. Of this amount, $150 million is financed by the Japanese Ban...

The drought that has affected most of Guatemala in 2012 ruined half of this year's crops of the two main staples, maize and beans, the agriculture ministry said in a report released Thursday. All but four of Guatemala's 22 provinces are suffering from a lack of rainfall, the ministry said. Maize (corn) is the country's leading crop, with an average annual harvest of 1.67 million tons, wh...

Carla lost everything when she got pregnant at the age of 13: her first year of secondary school, her family, her boyfriend, and her happiness. She spent a year panhandling on the streets of the Nicaraguan capital before she was taken in by a shelter for young mothers. Her life fell apart in December 2006, when her mother discovered that she was three months pregnant as a result of being ra...

Xena, a 4-month-old Labrador, will be the first assistance dog in Costa Rica to help a 7-year-old autistic boy named Aaron adapt better to his surroundings, thanks to a solidarity project undertaken by Spain's Association of Dog-Assisted Therapies, or AIAP. Miguel Angel Signes is one of the instructors in charge of training the canine, and since early this year he has been in Costa Rica wit...

Since the beginning of the year El Salvador has registered over 18,000 suspected cases of tropical dengue fever, with 4,800 confirmed, 2,300 hospitalizations and two deaths from the hemorrhagic type that can be fatal. The increasing number of cases pushed authorities to declare a national emergency, launching campaigns throughout the territory to eradicate the principal mosquito vector of d...

In the past The Costa Rica Star published an article about the oldest man in Costa Rica current living at 112 years old. Blue Zones are geographic areas with high concentrations of the world’s longest-lived people. The term was coined by journalist and explorer Dan Buettner, who, in partnership with longevity researchers, has spent the last decade traveling to the healthiest corners of the ...