In October and November 1993 Costa Rica and Panama detected indigenous transmission of dengue fever in their territories. The reappearance of the disease in these countries occurred after more than 40 years of absence in Costa Rica and more than 50 years in Panama. Consequently, there are no longer any continental Latin American tropical countries freefrom denguefever. In the last 10years, with...

GPS observations in Costa Rica from 1994-1997 reveal a complex pattern of motion consistent with the superposition of seismic cycle and secular plate margin deformation. In the south, velocity vectors are consistent with motion of the Panama Block plus postseismic deformation following the 1991 Limon earthquake, and interseismic strain due to partial locking of the Middle America Trench (MAT) t...

Background MundoComm is a current NIH-funded project for sustainable public health capacity building in community engagement and technological advances aimed at improving maternal health issues. Two to four teams are selected annually, each consisting of three healthcare professionals and one technical person from specific low and middle income countries (LMICs) including Costa Rica, Dominican ...

In this paper, I discuss the reasons for Costa Rica’s economic performance over the last quarter of a century. Three complementary sets of policies (investments in human capital, careful stabilization, and an intelligent and aggressive integration into the world economy) explain the successful trends, and can be thought of—at least in hindsight—as a development strategy. While fruitful, this st...

1 University of Miami, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Global Public Health Program, Miami, Florida, United States of America. Send correspondence to: Adriana Troyo, Global Public Health Program, University of Miami, 12500 SW 152nd Street, Building B, Miami, FL 33177, United States; e-mail: [email protected]. edu 2 Universidad de Costa Rica, Centro de Investigación en Enfermedades ...

We used a phylogeographic approach to elucidate the evolutionary history of a lineage of frogs, known as Pristimantis (formerly Eleutherodactylus) ridens (Anura: Brachycephalidae), restricted to the wet forests occurring along the Caribbean versant of isthmian Central America as well as the disjunct wet forest on the Pacific slope of Costa Rica. We placed our phylogeographic study of P. ridens ...

From 1993 to 1997, we observed Scarlet Macaw (Ara macao) feeding behavior in Central Pacific Costa Rica. Feeding data acquired in this study were not collected systematically, but opportunistically whenever macaws were observed feeding. To supplement feeding observations, we conducted interviews with local residents. Scarlet Macaws fed on seeds, fruits, leaves, flowers and/or bark of 43 plant s...

Although salamanders are characteristic amphibians in Holarctic temperate habitats, in tropical regions they have diversified evolutionarily only in tropical America. An adaptive radiation centered in Middle America occurred late in the history of a single clade, the supergenus Bolitoglossa (Plethodontidae), and large numbers of species now occur in diverse habitats. Sublineages within this cla...