Palau

The dengue outbreak began in November last year.

According to the Ministry of Health, there were 290 cases from January to June, with the majority occurring in the capital.

Last month there were 106 cases alone.

Nearly half the dengue victims are people aged between 10 and 29 years, with more males affected than females.

The state government is undertaking an aggressive cleanup of Koror, aiming to remove breeding sites for mosquitoes.

It said the infected person has not recently travelled to any Zika-affected areas in the region so is likely to have been infected in Palau.

The Bureau has initiated activities to control and prevent any further spread, including the minimising of mosquito breeding grounds.

It said anyone who thinks they may have been infected with Zika should seek medical attention, especially pregnant women.

In congratulating  Remengesau, Prime Minister Bainimarama said that Fiji and Palau share the potential to “strengthen our bilateral ties across a broad front”.

The Prime Minister also used the occasion to speak broadly about the collective stand that Pacific leaders should take in the lead up to the Climate Change Summit in Paris later this year.

This came in a formal agreement between the presidents of the two countries, Cuba's Raúl Castro and Palau's Tommy Remengesau, at a ceremony in New York where the leaders are attending a UN summit.

Cuba's official state news agency Prensa Latina reports the Palau president as saying the diplomatic link-up symbolises the respect that Cuba has for small countries.

Remengesau said his country cherished the relation with Cuba and would do everything it could to make it prosper.

The development of the Initial Damage Assessment form and training is funded by the European Union’s Building Safety and Resilience in the Pacific Project which is implemented by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community or SPC.

The training, facilitated by SPC’s Geoscience Division, adopts training materials that have been delivered across the Pacific since 1995 and incorporate the latest thinking in disaster risk management.

This is a question the latest economic review of the Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia, issued last week, suggests should be asked by officials from these two north Pacific nations.

The Graduate School USA, which produces annual economic reports on these three U.S.-affiliated nations, includes an assessment in the reports of the U.S.-funded national trust funds now being capitalized to provide a funding source to the island governments when U.S grant funding ends after 2023.

The finalists for the prestigious industry award were unveiled last week at the sixth edition of Seafood Expo Asia in Hong Kong. Dawn Martin, President of SeaWeb, was joined by Suzanne Gendron, Director of the Ocean Park Foundation in Hong Kong and a 2016 Seafood Champion Awards Judge, to make the announcement to a crowd of seafood industry professionals and media.

Congratulations though may not be in order yet, as people are still puzzling over the changes the Senate made to the House version of the Belau Submarine Cable Corporation bill.

The House bill 9-163, Belau Submarine Cable Corporation (BSCC), seeks to establish a public corporation to procure, own and manage a submarine cable to connect Palau to Guam.

The statement, according to Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga of Tuvalu was unanimously supported by all the seven SIS members, Cook Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, Marshall Islands, Palau and Tuvalu.

For the first time, SIS Leaders met behind closed doors to deliberate issues that concern the grouping, choosing to release a ‘strong’ statement to reflect their unique and special vulnerabilities.

PM Sopoaga told journalists, Small Island States have been advocating strongly for climate change since the early 1990s.

The leaders of the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau and Tuvalu caught up on Monday before the wider 16 nation Pacific Island Forum leaders summit in Papua New Guinea later this week.

They issued a special declaration on climate change that demanded the world limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and that countries uphold the principle of polluter pays.