Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO) Dr Roshan Paras­ram says the re­gion is list­ed as be­ing mod­er­ate­ly at risk for an out­break of mon­key­pox but is not rul­ing out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the virus reach­ing T&T’s shores.

Cur­rent­ly, how­ev­er, the Gov­ern­ment is not con­sid­er­ing trav­el re­stric­tions for the virus.

“The rat­ing for the re­gion of the Amer­i­c­as that have been put through their IHR (In­ter­na­tion­al Health Reg­u­la­tions) mech­a­nism is prob­a­bly (a) mod­er­ate risk at this point in time and that will change as time goes on,” Paras­ram said dur­ing yes­ter­day’s vir­tu­al COVID-19 me­dia brief­ing. 

“There are cas­es in Amer­i­ca, there’s cas­es in Cana­da, there’s cas­es in UK and Eu­rope and we have fre­quent trav­el to those ar­eas, so mod­er­ate risk at this point is prob­a­bly the best as­sess­ment so far.”

How­ev­er, while trav­el re­stric­tions will be lift­ed for COVID-19, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said the Gov­ern­ment has no in­ten­tion of in­sti­tut­ing re­stric­tions for trav­ellers com­ing from the 11 coun­tries out­side of Africa where the dis­ease is en­dem­ic. 

“We have just freed up the abil­i­ty of peo­ple to en­ter and leave Trinidad and To­ba­go, so at this time there is no in­tent on the part of the Min­istry of Health to rec­om­mend any trav­el re­stric­tion due to mon­key­pox from any coun­try in any part of the world,” he said. 

On Fri­day, the Min­istry of Health con­vened an emer­gency meet­ing with its of­fi­cials and Dr Er­i­ca Wheel­er, the coun­try rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO), to dis­cuss the glob­al out­break of mon­key­pox. Com­ing out of it, Deyals­ingh said were sev­er­al de­ci­sions. These in­clude alert­ing and en­gag­ing the pub­lic on the signs and symp­toms of the dis­ease. He said it was al­so de­cid­ed to re-en­er­gise and re-em­pha­sise screen­ing at ports of en­try for peo­ple ex­hibit­ing flu-like symp­toms.

The CMO al­so alert­ed re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties to in­form physi­cians and clin­ics of the signs, symp­toms and pro­to­cols for treat­ing with a de­tect­ed case.

Deyals­ingh said the T&T Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent was al­so alert­ed to in­form the pri­vate health­care sec­tor. He said they al­so be­gan the process to pro­cure small­pox vac­cines and an­tivi­ral med­ica­tion to treat cas­es. He said the min­istry is al­so work­ing with the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) to es­tab­lish test­ing pro­to­cols for the CARI­COM re­gion and is al­so work­ing to es­tab­lish the ca­pac­i­ty to se­quence the virus at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies. 

Mean­while, Dr Wheel­er said while there are over 150 con­firmed cas­es glob­al­ly out­side of Africa, there aren’t any con­firmed cas­es of mon­key­pox in the re­gion.

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