KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

Over the past four days, the Min­istry of Health (MoH) has record­ed 58 new dengue cas­es.

This now brings the to­tal num­ber of lab­o­ra­to­ry-con­firmed dengue in­fec­tions to 450, a whop­ping jump from 392 record­ed just last Fri­day.

In a re­lease yes­ter­day, the min­istry said the death toll re­mained at four.

But with cas­es in­creas­ing dai­ly, the min­istry is ad­vis­ing the pub­lic to be aware of symp­toms.

These in­clude fever, headaches, pain be­hind eyes, skin rash­es, mus­cle and joint pains, nau­sea, vom­it­ing and di­ar­rhoea.

How­ev­er, while cas­es are climb­ing, one pri­vate hos­pi­tal said this was not in­dica­tive of a sick pop­u­la­tion, nor was it un­usu­al at this time of year.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia via tele­phone yes­ter­day, Med­ical lab di­rec­tor at St Au­gus­tine Pri­vate Hos­pi­tal (SAPH) Dr Derek Em­manuel said, “A lot of them are pos­i­tive, but what I am cog­nisant of is that fact the peo­ple who are com­ing are the peo­ple who are sick. The fact that there are pos­i­tives isn’t in­dica­tive of a pop­u­la­tion be­ing pos­i­tive, it’s just in­dica­tive that the peo­ple com­ing are sick. We are see­ing a lot of peo­ple com­ing in and we are see­ing a lot of pos­i­tive cas­es for dengue.

“In terms of num­bers, it’s not like every day. In one day we might have be­tween eight to ten peo­ple but not every day con­sec­u­tive. It might be two times or three times for the week. They ac­tu­al­ly did a com­par­i­son be­tween here and re­gion­al­ly of the dengue cas­es for the past ten or fif­teen years and it was much high­er some years back.”

Dr Em­manuel al­so said while there was no way to tell who could be­come in­fect­ed or die from dengue fever, per­sons with ge­net­ic pre­dis­po­si­tions such as sick­le cell dis­ease were more sus­cep­ti­ble to dy­ing, since fa­tal­i­ty from the vi­ral dis­ease came from bleed­ing in­ter­nal­ly.

SAPH’s med­ical lab said it re­ports its dengue cas­es to the min­istry.

How­ev­er, un­like dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic where all med­ical in­sti­tu­tions were man­dat­ed to re­port pos­i­tive COVID-19 cas­es to the MoH, pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions are not legal­ly ob­lig­at­ed to re­port pos­i­tive dengue cas­es.