Kevon Felmine

Fears that the rapid­ly spread­ing Zi­ka virus would hit the shores of T&T ma­te­ri­alised yes­ter­day when Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh an­nounced T&T's first con­firmed case.Care­ful not to iden­ti­fy the vic­tim or lo­ca­tion, Deyals­ingh said it was a 61-year-old woman who re­cent­ly re­turned from a vis­it to New Zealand.

How­ev­er, he said New Zealand was not a coun­try with con­firmed cas­es of Zi­ka.He said the case was con­firmed by the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (Carpha) and an in­ves­ti­ga­tion would be­gin to de­ter­mine how the woman con­tract­ed the virus. He said the woman was at her home re­cov­er­ing.He was speak­ing at the Pe­nal Rock Road Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre yes­ter­day where he over­saw a Rapid Re­sponse Mos­qui­to Erad­i­ca­tion Ex­er­cise aimed at tar­get­ing the aedes ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­to which trans­mits the virus.

"The way in which she ac­quired the virus will now be in­ves­ti­gat­ed. Her area will be looked at and she will be looked at to make sure she has re­cov­ered prop­er­ly from the virus.

"She first pre­sent­ed with symp­toms on Feb­ru­ary 10 and the sam­ple sent to Carpha for test­ing on Feb­ru­ary 12. It takes a few days to get the re­sults so Trinidad and To­ba­go has it first of­fi­cial case of Zi­ka," Deyals­ingh said.

With pos­si­ble deaths and the threat to preg­nant women and their ba­bies be­ing born with se­ri­ous birth de­fects, Deyals­ingh plead­ed with cit­i­zens not to politi­cise the is­sue to cause hys­te­ria.He as­sured the pub­lic that no one would die of the Zi­ka virus, stat­ing that 80 per cent of vic­tims do not show any symp­toms.

"This is a non-po­lit­i­cal is­sue. I am ap­peal­ing to all and sundry not to turn this in­to a po­lit­i­cal is­sue by mak­ing state­ments which are on­ly geared to cre­ate chaos, con­fu­sion and pan­ic.

"In this room, if you have 100 peo­ple and lets as­sume all of us has Zi­ka, 80 per cent will show no symp­toms of Zi­ka."

With in­creased erad­i­ca­tion ex­er­cis­es be­ing done by the Min­istry of Health, it is now col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment bod­ies.He said the fo­cus was source re­duc­tion and that would be done by elim­i­nat­ing the aedes ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­toes.

While the Gov­ern­ment agen­cies are do­ing their part, he said cit­i­zens should do theirs by look­ing out for breed­ing sites which can be as small as a bot­tle cap.

What is Zi­ka

Ac­cord­ing to the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO), which has de­clared the virus a glob­al threat, peo­ple con­tract Zi­ka by be­ing bit­ten by an in­fect­ed aedes ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­to, the same type of mos­qui­to that spreads dengue, chikun­gun­ya and yel­low fever.The Zi­ka virus oc­curs in trop­i­cal ar­eas with large mos­qui­to pop­u­la­tions and is known to cir­cu­late in Africa, the Amer­i­c­as, South­ern Asia and the West­ern Pa­cif­ic.

Symp­toms of Zi­ka usu­al­ly ap­pear a few days af­ter in­fec­tion and in­clude slight fever and rash. Con­junc­tivi­tis, mus­cle and joint pain and fa­tigue can al­so oc­cur. The symp­toms usu­al­ly fin­ish in two to sev­en days.WHO said health au­thor­i­ties were cur­rent­ly in­ves­ti­gat­ing a po­ten­tial link be­tween the Zi­ka virus in preg­nant women and mi­cro­cephaly in their ba­bies.

Un­til more is known, women who are preg­nant or plan­ning to be­come preg­nant should take ex­tra care to pro­tect them­selves from mos­qui­to bites.Mi­cro­cephaly is a rare con­di­tion where a ba­by has an ab­nor­mal­ly small head. This is due to ab­nor­mal brain de­vel­op­ment of the ba­by in the womb or dur­ing in­fan­cy.

Ba­bies and chil­dren with mi­cro­cephaly of­ten have chal­lenges with their brain de­vel­op­ment as they grow old­er.