The Health Min­istry is ad­vis­ing cit­i­zens to take per­son­al pre­cau­tions as a fresh plume of Sa­ha­ran dust is ex­pect­ed to en­ter T&T’s at­mos­phere on Mon­day.

Since the be­gin­ning of the dry sea­son, the coun­try has ex­pe­ri­enced sev­er­al waves of the dust how­ev­er; the Met Of­fice said this year’s oc­cur­rences are no dif­fer­ent from that seen in pre­vi­ous years.

“This is noth­ing out of the norm. Years gone by in this of­fice here, we had se­vere dust out­breaks with the vis­i­bil­i­ty was down to less than one kilo­me­tre,” an of­fi­cial from the of­fice told Guardian Me­dia.

He said that ac­cord­ing to their mod­el, this plume is ex­pect­ed to be less than the last.

The dust is fore­cast to en­ter the Caribbean to­mor­row with the heav­i­est con­cen­tra­tion be­ing no­tice­able from Mon­day.

The ma­jor down­side to the dust is its im­pact on health, par­tic­u­lar­ly on those with pre-ex­ist­ing res­pi­ra­to­ry con­di­tions such as lung and asth­ma dis­ease; heart dis­ease, the el­der­ly and chil­dren.

Com­mon symp­toms cit­i­zens may ex­pe­ri­ence as a re­sult of the dust in­clude dry cough, sore throat, itchy and wa­tery eyes, sneez­ing, and run­ny nose. These symp­toms should dis­ap­pear as dust lev­els re­duce.

The min­istry ad­vis­es that peo­ple with any pre-ex­ist­ing con­di­tions should stay in­doors where pos­si­ble and have their in­haler with them at all times.

They fur­ther ad­vise that those af­fect­ed “should seek med­ical at­ten­tion if they ex­pe­ri­ence se­vere short­ness of breath (dif­fi­cul­ty breath­ing), per­sis­tent fever (for more than 2-3 days) or a se­vere wors­en­ing of a pre-ex­ist­ing con­di­tion.”