An official of the Ministry of Health is reported to have indicated that T&T is "70 per cent ready" with respect to the threat from the Ebola virus. If this were intended to provide comfort to the population I'm afraid that this has only further increased our concern.The WHO has designated the Ebola outbreak as a public health emergency of international concern. Accordingly there are critical elements that determine a country's state of readiness based on its capability for the performance measures, tasks and resource considerations in areas such as:
�2bio-surveillance
�2community resilience
�2countermeasures and mitigation
�2 incident management and
�2 information management
Carnival 2015 is less than five months away. Unless we are fully satisfied that we can effectively respond to develop logistics and operational plans for the optimised use of medical countermeasures at all levels of response to the potential pandemic, perhaps we should take a long and hard look at the implications for Carnival 2015.There is really no notion of being partially ready when dealing with bio-safety, bio-containment/bio-security issues. The state of readiness conforms with the rule of "all or none rule." While there will always be medical countermeasure gaps for all sections of the population, these must have been identified and clear pathways recommended for addressing them.This may well require taking decisions that could be both costly and unpopular but which may be in the long-term interest of us all.
Samuel B Howard
Maracas-St Joseph