RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

A se­nior Min­istry of Health of­fi­cial has con­firmed that a Venezue­lan mi­grant is be­lieved to be the pri­ma­ry source of a clus­ter of malar­ia cas­es in Trinidad, which has now spread to eight peo­ple.

The of­fi­cial, who re­quest­ed anonymi­ty, re­vealed that the clus­ter is lo­cat­ed in Moru­ga and in­clud­ed a 10-year-old child.

On Mon­day, the Min­istry of Health in a state­ment an­nounced that one more per­son test­ed pos­i­tive for malar­ia, rais­ing the to­tal num­ber of con­firmed cas­es to eight.

The Min­istry of Health of­fi­cial ex­plained to Guardian Me­dia that the mi­grant was part of a group of Venezue­lan na­tion­als who work, live, and so­cial­ize with sev­er­al of the con­firmed cas­es.

The first case was de­tect­ed in the child, who was ward­ed at the San Fer­nan­do Teach­ing Hos­pi­tal. He has since been dis­charged.

The of­fi­cial said the In­sect Vec­tor Con­trol Di­vi­sion (IVCD) was alert­ed on March 27, with lab­o­ra­to­ry con­fir­ma­tion re­ceived on March 28. Fol­low­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions, four ad­di­tion­al cas­es were iden­ti­fied in the Moru­ga area. Over the week­end, three more in­di­vid­u­als test­ed pos­i­tive.

The af­fect­ed in­di­vid­u­als live with­in a one-kilo­me­tre ra­dius of each oth­er, ex­cept for the child, who lives fur­ther away but fre­quent­ly vis­its the oth­er cas­es as they are his rel­a­tives.

A doc­u­ment from the In­sect Vec­tor Con­trol De­part­ment (IVCD) ob­tained by Guardian Me­dia in­di­cat­ed that the in­fec­tion source is said to be a Venezue­lan mi­grant who ar­rived in Trinidad and lat­er ex­hib­it­ed symp­toms con­sis­tent with malar­ia. The in­di­vid­ual re­turned to Venezuela with­out be­ing test­ed in Trinidad, and his cur­rent health sta­tus is un­known.

All con­firmed cas­es re­ceived treat­ment, and five have since been dis­charged from the hos­pi­tal.

The of­fi­cial said a Venezue­lan na­tion­al who test­ed pos­i­tive is cur­rent­ly off­shore and will be treat­ed up­on re­turn, as med­i­cine has been left for him. The Min­istry of Health of­fi­cial as­sured us that a team would mon­i­tor the case.

Since the clus­ter of malar­ia cas­es was made pub­lic, health in­spec­tors and lo­cal gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials have start­ed in­ten­si­fied spray­ing ef­forts to con­trol the spread.

Malar­ia is a mos­qui­to-borne dis­ease caused by the Plas­mod­i­um par­a­site and is trans­mit­ted through the bite of in­fect­ed fe­male Anophe­les mos­qui­toes.

The min­istry, in a state­ment last week, said Trinidad and To­ba­go is not en­dem­ic to malar­ia as most cas­es are im­port­ed or in­tro­duced. It not­ed that 153 cas­es were record­ed be­tween 2015 and 2024, av­er­ag­ing 15 cas­es per year.