The Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Cu­mu­to/Man­zanil­la, Dr. Rai Rag­bir, is urg­ing Gov­ern­ment to be on the alert in the event a mys­te­ri­ous dis­ease in the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Re­pub­lic of Con­go—which al­ready has claimed dozens of lives and in­fect­ed hun­dreds more—makes an ap­pear­ance in T&T.

He is con­cerned that it will just be a mat­ter of time be­fore it be­gins to cross bor­ders.

Ear­li­er to­day, Con­go’s health min­is­ter re­vealed to in­ter­na­tion­al me­dia that the Con­golese gov­ern­ment is on alert, es­pe­cial­ly as near­ly half of those who have died from the “mys­tery flu-like dis­ease” were chil­dren.

The symp­toms of the ill­ness have been iden­ti­fied as headache, fever, res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­tress (cough), and ane­mia.

In an of­fi­cial state­ment, Dr Rai Rag­bir warned of the po­ten­tial­ly se­vere na­ture of the ill­ness and called on the Row­ley Ad­min­is­tra­tion to adopt a proac­tive stance where the dis­ease is con­cerned.

“I urge the Min­istry of Health to mon­i­tor this un­fold­ing sit­u­a­tion close­ly. Our lo­cal health au­thor­i­ties must re­main vig­i­lant and ready to act swift­ly should any threats emerge,” he stat­ed.  

“Ad­di­tion­al­ly,” Dr Rag­bir said, “the gov­ern­ment must ur­gent­ly re­assess its pub­lic health strat­e­gy and pri­or­i­tize build­ing the in­fra­struc­ture nec­es­sary to re­spond to emerg­ing dis­eases.”

Re­count­ing the chal­lenges the coun­try faced in the ear­ly days of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, and its lack of a co­or­di­nat­ed ap­proach, the Cu­mu­to/Man­zanil­la MP urged pub­lic health de­ci­sion mak­ers to re­mem­ber the harsh lessons taught dur­ing that time, not­ing:

“We can­not af­ford com­pla­cen­cy when lives are at stake … im­ple­ment a com­pre­hen­sive pan­dem­ic re­sponse frame­work to en­sure we are pre­pared for the next health emer­gency.”

At present, 71 peo­ple in the Con­go have died from the ill­ness, 27 of whom died in hos­pi­tals.

The Con­golese health min­is­ter re­port­ed that of the vic­tims at the hos­pi­tals, 10 died due to lack of blood trans­fu­sion and 17 as a re­sult of res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems.

He al­so con­firmed that epi­demi­o­log­i­cal ex­perts are in the re­gion to take sam­ples and in­ves­ti­gate the dis­ease.