Leah So­rias

Health Min­is­ter Therese Bap­tiste-Cor­nelis says her min­istry will do all it can to com­bat the spread of dengue. She said, how­ev­er, that the min­istry need­ed the sup­port of the pub­lic. Her state­ment came short­ly be­fore Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr An­ton Cum­ber­batch an­nounced there was a dengue out­break, dur­ing a news con­fer­ence at the Min­istry of Health's Park Street of­fice, Port-of-Spain.

Cor­nelis-Bap­tiste said the Min­istry's In­sect Vec­tor Con­trol Unit had been in­creased by 60 peo­ple who will start work from next Tues­day.

She said a meet­ing would be held with pri­vate doc­tors to fur­ther brief them on the poli­cies that were deemed ac­cept­able. She said min­istry of­fi­cials, in­clud­ing heads of the var­i­ous Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties have been brain­storm­ing ad­di­tion­al mea­sures they could use to pre­vent the spread of the virus. "We've come up with the idea of giv­ing out gan­ules (lar­vi­ci­dal) at var­i­ous dis­tri­b­u­tion points via the lo­cal gov­ern­ment agen­cies to fa­cil­i­tate them be­ing able to put these in their tanks," she said. She said health in­spec­tors had been sent out to var­i­ous ar­eas to check for breed­ing sites but locked gates and loose dogs pre­vent­ed them from do­ing so. She said the idea of the gran­ule dis­tri­b­u­tion came about as a re­sult of this.

She urged cit­i­zens to open their homes when their area is be­ing sprayed. "The fog is not dan­ger­ous, on­ly to the mos­qui­toes," Bap­tiste- Cor­nelis said. She added that the prob­lem of bed short­ages at the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex in Mt Hope was ad­dressed with the com­mis­sion­ing of 150 beds. She said an ad­di­tion­al 22 beds would be com­mis­sioned soon to deal with the dengue sit­u­a­tion.