Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

The swine flu death toll has now climbed to four and health of­fi­cials at San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal are lim­it­ing the num­ber of vis­i­tors to the wards.

This was re­vealed yes­ter­day as of­fi­cials of the Health Min­istry held a news con­fer­ence at the South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty of­fice in San Fer­nan­do. Ex­ec­u­tive Med­ical Di­rec­tor Dr Al­bert Per­saud said five peo­ple–four men and one woman–be­tween the ages of 30 to 49, died at San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal over the past week. He said: "Since Wednes­day, we have lost three more per­sons whose deaths were pos­i­tive for the H1N1 virus. "That is a to­tal of five peo­ple in the South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty in the past week that we lost. "They were all treat­ed at hos­pi­tal and at the time of their pass­ing were all se­vere­ly ill," Per­saud added. How­ev­er, med­ical di­rec­tor of the hos­pi­tal Dr Stephen Ram­roop said four were con­firmed as hav­ing the H1N1 virus, while the fifth per­son died from sea­son­al in­fluen­za. He al­so said that two more peo­ple were be­ing treat­ed at hos­pi­tal for sus­pect­ed swine flu. Swab tests sam­ples have been sent to Carec for test­ing. De­spite this, Ram­roop said there was no in­flux of pa­tients at the Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency De­part­ment, as there was clin­i­cal man­age­ment of pa­tients. He said af­ter post-mortems, new dis­clo­sures were re­vealed.

"We have iden­ti­fied new find­ings of the dis­ease which we have dis­cussed at clin­i­cal lev­el and we will be in­tro­duc­ing an­oth­er in­ter­ven­tion which is in keep­ing with lit­er­a­ture of physi­cians across the world, to add an­oth­er scheme of treat­ment that will help," Ram­roop said. He said peo­ple who come to ca­su­al­ty com­plain­ing of res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems were di­rect­ed to the am­bu­lance bay where they are med­ical­ly ex­am­ined. Those who were crit­i­cal­ly ill are tak­en to iso­lat­ed wards. Asked about the safe­ty of staff, Ram­roop said that ad­di­tion­al train­ing sem­i­nars were be­ing held for staff. He said an ad­e­quate stock of pro­tec­tive gear has been made avail­able for staff from the Health Min­istry. Ram­roop al­so de­nied re­ports that there was a short­age of nurs­ing staff at the In­ten­sive Care Unit. He said those pa­tients who de­vel­op a mild case of the flu are sent home and are mon­i­tored by spe­cial­ly trained nurs­es.