Rad­hi­ca De Sil­va

Se­nior Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Health Min­is­ter Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe says con­firmed dengue cas­es in T&T fell sig­nif­i­cant­ly be­tween Jan­u­ary and Ju­ly 2025, with on­ly 28 cas­es record­ed, com­pared to 658 dur­ing the same pe­ri­od in 2024. He cau­tioned that de­spite the drop, con­tin­ued pre­ven­tion ef­forts re­main nec­es­sary.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia, Dr Bo­doe said, “Based on the Na­tion­al Sur­veil­lance Net­work, for the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 2025 to Ju­ly 2025, there have been a to­tal of 28 con­firmed cas­es of dengue fever and no deaths as­so­ci­at­ed with dengue fever in­fec­tion.”

He con­firmed a sig­nif­i­cant de­crease from the same pe­ri­od in 2024, dur­ing which there were 658 con­firmed cas­es and 19 deaths.

De­spite the de­crease, Dr Bo­doe cau­tioned against com­pla­cen­cy.

“It does mean that we should, you know, aban­don the mea­sures that we could cur­rent­ly take,” he said.

He not­ed that for Ju­ly 2025, there were no con­firmed dengue cas­es, adding that the aedes in­dex, which tracks mos­qui­to breed­ing in house­holds, al­so saw a ma­jor drop.

“This gen­er­al­ly means that there is a 40-50 per cent re­duc­tion in risk of dengue trans­mis­sion for Ju­ly 2025 com­pared to the sim­i­lar pe­ri­od last year,” he said.

Dr Bo­doe ex­plained that the min­istry con­tin­ued to lead a pre­ven­tion cam­paign across the coun­try.

“A mul­ti-sec­toral ap­proach is be­ing adopt­ed to fo­cus on dengue pre­ven­tion through source re­duc­tion and pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion,” he said.

The min­is­ter al­so con­firmed im­proved co­or­di­na­tion be­tween agen­cies.

“The Min­istry of Health and the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and lo­cal gov­ern­ment would have met a few weeks ago... there ap­peared to be a gap be­tween the Min­istry of Health’s In­sect Vec­tor Con­trol Di­vi­sion and the role of the lo­cal gov­ern­ment bod­ies.”

He added, “So the Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment and I met to­geth­er with a team of tech­nocrats. And I’m hap­py to re­port that we ac­tu­al­ly have a doc­u­ment which will deal with en­hanced in­ter-sec­toral col­lab­o­ra­tion in vec­tor con­trol ef­forts.”

He al­so ad­dressed gov­ern­ment sup­port for on­go­ing mos­qui­to con­trol.

“The gov­ern­ment has pri­ori­tised, and of course, the ex­pen­di­ture for the chem­i­cals and so on that are re­quired would be pro­tect­ed and pro­vid­ed. We’ve been giv­en the as­sur­ance that those are nec­es­sary sup­plies,” he said.

Dr Bo­doe said the re­vised strat­e­gy is ex­pect­ed to im­prove co­or­di­na­tion.

“What this will do is al­so en­hance and make the process more ef­fi­cient, so there’s no over­lap­ping of what would have hap­pened last year.”

In Au­gust 2024, eight-year-old Nel­isha Nar­ine of Princes Town, a Stan­dard One stu­dent of North Trace Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School, died from dengue fever.

An au­top­sy done on Nar­ine re­vealed she died from pre­sump­tive dengue shock syn­drome with gas­troin­testi­nal haem­or­rhage.

At that time, MP for Oropouche East Dr Roodal Mooni­lal blamed the PNM gov­ern­ment for the dengue deaths, say­ing there were se­vere short­ages in the In­sect Vec­tor Con­trol De­part­ment as a crit­i­cal fail­ure in the gov­ern­ment’s re­sponse.

In­sect Vec­tor De­part­ment of­fi­cers com­plained of short­ages of equip­ment, chem­i­cals and man­pow­er. Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh lat­er redi­rect­ed re­sources but said the in­dis­crim­i­nate use of chem­i­cals could re­sult in the de­vel­op­ment of in­sec­ti­cide re­sis­tance with­in the mos­qui­to pop­u­la­tion, which could re­sult in ad­verse ef­fects on non-tar­get or­gan­isms such as but­ter­flies and can­dle flies. At that time, he said the main method of con­trol should re­main source re­duc­tion strate­gies, which should be im­ple­ment­ed at both the house­hold and com­mu­ni­ty lev­els.