Leah So­rias

Days af­ter a dengue out­break was de­clared in T&T, Guyana is said to be fac­ing a sim­i­lar threat. Ac­cord­ing to a re­port in the Star­broek News yes­ter­day, Guyana's Health Min­is­ter Dr Leslie Ram­sam­my said there had been 1,000 cas­es of dengue fever for the year so far. He said this was com­pared to the 760 cas­es re­port­ed for the same pe­ri­od last year. So far one dengue death has been con­firmed in the coun­try, but re­ports said lep­tospiro­sis was the con­tribut­ing fac­tor in this death. Ram­sam­my said over the years, sta­tis­tics had shown that the fig­ures for dengue fever had risen.

Echo­ing state­ments made by T&T's chief med­ical of­fi­cer An­ton Cum­ber­batch last week, Ram­sam­my said the in­crease in the preva­lence rate of dengue was as a re­sult of cli­mate change. Dur­ing a news con­fer­ence last week, Cum­ber­batch de­clared that the rate of in­creased dengue in­fec­tions had reached an "out­break rate." He said there had been more than 600 re­port­ed cas­es of the virus with five deaths, three of which were con­firmed. Dengue is spread by the aedes ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­to which sur­vives and breeds in clear wa­ter.

Dengue fever caus­es flu-like symp­toms, in­clud­ing high fever, se­vere headache (es­pe­cial­ly be­hind the eyes), joint and mus­cle pain (es­pe­cial­ly in the low­er back), bone pain, rash, mild bleed­ing (nose or gums bleed­ing) and easy bruis­ing. It can al­so take on a he­m­or­rhag­ic form, caus­ing sud­den death through in­ter­nal bleed­ing and bleed­ing from body ori­fices. Ac­cord­ing to the lat­est sta­tis­tics avail­able from the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion, more than 16,700 to­tal cas­es of dengue had been re­port­ed across the Caribbean in ear­ly June.

In Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, lo­cal health au­thor­i­ties have re­port­ed more than 50,000 dengue cas­es so far this year, and more than 40 deaths.

Ja­maican cit­i­zens al­so have been alert­ed to the threat of the virus, hav­ing record­ed 70 cas­es so far. Ac­cord­ing to a re­port in the Ja­maica Glean­er, yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter of Health William Broughton urged peo­ple to re­main vig­i­lant to pre­vent a pos­si­ble out­break of the virus. A re­port in the Glean­er on Tues­day said the is­land's health min­istry had spent mil­lions of dol­lars fog­ging, clear­ing breed­ing sites and car­ry­ing out pub­lic-ed­u­ca­tion pro­grammes in ap­prox­i­mate­ly 300 com­mu­ni­ties na­tion­wide.