Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

In less than 48 hours, this coun­try’s con­firmed dengue cas­es in­creased from 303 to 392. But even with such an in­crease, epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds said the pat­tern that dengue has demon­strat­ed in the past shows this is the time of year when cas­es in­crease rapid­ly. “As the rainy sea­son starts, mov­ing from Ju­ly in­to Au­gust, if cas­es are to in­crease, they in­crease at their fastest,” he ex­plained. He was speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence at the Min­istry of Health’s Cor­po­rate Head­quar­ters, Queen’s Park East, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day. It was held fol­low­ing an all-gov­ern­ment ap­proach meet­ing to deal with dengue. 

Dr Hinds said the health sec­tor was ful­ly ca­pa­ble of deal­ing with the cur­rent cas­es as they al­so took pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures. “We are al­so do­ing the back­ground work on how to in­form the pub­lic on how to not get in­fect­ed. We are push­ing to re­duce the im­pact on the pop­u­la­tion,” he said.

The epi­demi­ol­o­gist ex­plained that younger peo­ple were more sus­cep­ti­ble to dengue. “We have not­ed that maybe about half of the con­firmed cas­es have been in the younger age group, maybe five to 19, but this is not some­thing that’s un­usu­al; this is some­thing that you see when you have those about once-a-decade in­creas­es in cir­cu­la­tion,” he added.

He said there was no da­ta on the eth­nic­i­ty com­po­nent, and gen­der da­ta showed that males and fe­males con­tract­ed dengue equal­ly. For those rea­sons and oth­ers, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said they have not de­clared dengue a pub­lic health emer­gency of in­ter­na­tion­al con­cern (PHE­IC) amid the op­po­si­tion’s call for the Gov­ern­ment to do so.

Ac­cord­ing to the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO), a PHE­IC is an ex­tra­or­di­nary event that is de­ter­mined to con­sti­tute a pub­lic health risk to oth­er states through the in­ter­na­tion­al spread of dis­ease and po­ten­tial­ly re­quires a co­or­di­nat­ed in­ter­na­tion­al re­sponse. Dr Paras­ram said the cri­te­ria to de­clare a PHE­IC in­clude the pub­lic health im­pact of the event; whether the event is un­usu­al or un­ex­pect­ed; and whether there is a sig­nif­i­cant risk for in­ter­na­tion­al spread or in­ter­na­tion­al trav­el or trade.

“We could see clear­ly that dengue doesn’t tick any of the four box­es of PHE­IC,” he said. Since the in­crease in cas­es over the last month, there have been nu­mer­ous calls for the Gov­ern­ment to spray more.

To re-en­force why spray­ing was not the so­lu­tion, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh shared the views of three pub­lic health of­fi­cials who op­er­ate in the most in­fect­ed coun­ties in the coun­try–Dr Ou­ma­tee Ar­joon-Singh, the prin­ci­pal med­ical and health of­fi­cer of the Pe­nal/Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion; Farzan Rus­sul, the pub­lic health ad­min­is­tra­tor of the Siparia Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion; and Dr Olalekan Ju­mat, the prin­ci­pal med­ical and health of­fi­cer of the Princes Town Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion.

He said they all agreed that source re­duc­tion was the best so­lu­tion to curb the spread of dengue. Source re­duc­tion, or the re­moval of mos­qui­to breed­ing and breed­ing habi­tats, is the key to bring­ing down the mos­qui­to pop­u­la­tion and dengue cas­es. “They ex­press­ly sup­port­ed the min­istry’s per­spec­tive that source re­duc­tion at the lev­el of the home is the prin­ci­pal way of con­trol­ling the Aedes ae­gyp­ti,” he stat­ed.

In a col­lab­o­ra­tive ef­fort with the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, Deyals­ingh said spray­ing, clean­ing, and grass-cut­ting were tak­ing place as they ed­u­cat­ed the pop­u­la­tion on source re­duc­tion. Peo­ple with breed­ing sites on their prop­er­ties will face a $3,500 fine. So far, pub­lic health in­spec­tors have is­sued 71 tick­ets. And while Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Faris Al-Rawi said they could turn up the tem­per­a­ture on the law, sim­i­lar to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, but that was not the in­ten­tion. He said the of­fend­ers were giv­en a few days to clean their area. “Re­mem­ber, there are go­ing to be cir­cum­stances where peo­ple can’t help them­selves,” he said.