Bo­bie-lee Dixon

While Health Min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan has as­sured the pub­lic that health fa­cil­i­ties are ready to deal with the H1N1 virus (swine flu) should there be an in­flux of cas­es, MP for Diego Mar­tin Cen­tral, Dr Amery Browne, says Khan has com­plete­ly messed up the pro­to­cols to deal with such sce­nar­ios and should come clean with the peo­ple of T&T.In a news re­lease on Fri­day, Browne ac­cused Khan of cre­at­ing fur­ther chaos by ad­vis­ing the pop­u­la­tion to vis­it their health cen­tres for vac­ci­na­tion against the "swine flu virus," while know­ing many of these in­sti­tu­tions ei­ther did not have any stock or not enough of the vac­cine."With these on­go­ing fail­ings, the pop­u­la­tion must be amazed at the lack of prop­er lead­er­ship in the health sec­tor and the na­tion as a whole," Browne said."Giv­en the to­tal lack of con­fi­dence in the Min­is­ter of Health, it is very dif­fi­cult to jus­ti­fy his con­tin­u­a­tion at the head of this im­por­tant min­istry and sec­tor." He said Khan had re­sumed his habit of mak­ing con­fus­ing state­ments to the me­dia on mat­ters that crit­i­cal­ly af­fect the na­tion's health sys­tem.

Browne said the pop­u­la­tion has been strug­gling with a hor­rif­ic lack of qual­i­ty care at many pub­lic health in­sti­tu­tions and the tar­di­ness of med­ical ser­vice con­tin­ues to re­sult in un­nec­es­sary loss of life. He said Khan's poor per­for­mance has helped to re­in­force the re­al­i­ty that the health sec­tor is at an all-time low in T&T.Re­fer­ring to the re­cent thefts at San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, Browne said the hos­pi­tal has been one in­sti­tu­tion among many that has had re­peat­ed thefts, and ob­vi­ous­ly prop­er se­cu­ri­ty arrange­ments should have long been put in place, at least af­ter the re­cent dis­ap­pear­ance of an ul­tra­sound ma­chine.He said he checked on Fri­day with staff at the Ward 17 Clin­ic at the SFGH, and while it is un­like­ly that any con­fi­den­tial med­ical da­ta would be re­trieved from the com­put­ers that were stolen last Thurs­day, the thieves could have had di­rect ac­cess to ac­tu­al pa­tient files and oth­er in­for­ma­tion dur­ing the break-in. He said if Khan was se­ri­ous about his re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, he would take such in­ci­dents more se­ri­ous­ly and put mea­sures in place to halt this pat­tern of lar­ce­ny and unau­tho­rised ac­cess.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view, how­ev­er, Khan said the health cen­tres were suf­fi­cient­ly equipped with both med­ical per­son­nel and med­i­cine. He told the T&T Guardian the min­istry was pushed in­to ac­tion with the swine flu cas­es which oc­curred in Bar­ba­dos and con­fir­ma­tion of six lo­cal cas­es by the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (Carpha) lab­o­ra­to­ry. He al­so said they were still prob­ing whether two deaths at the SFGH were re­lat­ed to swine flu."We sus­pect­ed that it was most­ly like­ly as a re­sult of the in­fluen­za. How­ev­er, both pa­tients had res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems not con­nect­ed to swine flu and one of the two pa­tients was 63 years old, so fur­ther test­ing is be­ing done," Khan said.He said be­cause the re­cent de­vel­op­ment of in­creased pos­i­tive stereo­types, the min­istry held a meet­ing last Thurs­day to de­ter­mine ex­act­ly what was avail­able with re­gards to vac­ci­na­tions and al­so man­age­ment for pa­tients who were pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive for the flu."We found out we have ap­prox­i­mate­ly 15,000 vac­cines avail­able and ap­prox­i­mate­ly 20,000 an­ti-vi­ral med­ica­tions. So we have asked the ex­ec­u­tive to dis­trib­ute it to the var­i­ous health cen­tres ac­cord­ing to in­ci­dence and need. And al­so to or­der more vac­cines and an­ti-vi­ral med­ica­tions," Khan said.

He re­it­er­at­ed that there should not be an over­re­ac­tion, as was the case in 2009, be­cause pre­ven­ta­tive meth­ods are more im­por­tant."Sim­ple things like wash­ing your hands with soap and wa­ter, cov­er­ing your mouth and nose when sneez­ing and main­tain­ing so­cial dis­tance are pre­ven­ta­tive meth­ods," Khan said.He added that the dis­tri­b­u­tion of vac­cines and med­ica­tions was be­ing ad­dressed and the min­istry was al­so in the process of dis­trib­ut­ing swabs for in­ves­tiga­tive analy­sis.How­ev­er, he said every cit­i­zen must not rush for swab test­ing ei­ther, but should mon­i­tor them­selves close­ly to see if their symp­toms tru­ly match that of in­fluen­za A H1N1 virus."You will know if you have the virus be­cause you must have a sud­den on­set of a very high fever, short­ness of breath, in­tense sore throat and peo­ple whose im­mune sys­tems are not com­pro­mised will re­spond to the virus nor­mal­ly, so every­one does not have to rush to the health fa­cil­i­ties," he said.Read­ing an e-mail sent to him from the med­ical epi­demi­ol­o­gist at the min­istry, Dr Av­ery Hinds, Khan said Hinds said the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion has as­sessed the cur­rent out­break across the re­gion and is hap­py with the pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures put in place and the meth­ods of in­ter­ven­tion.He said the mes­sage al­so stat­ed that what is oc­cur­ring is not un­usu­al for this time of year for in­fluen­za and since T&T is a sig­na­to­ry to the in­ter­na­tion­al health reg­u­la­tions, there is no need for any trav­el re­stric­tions.