Matthew Chin

Re­porter

matthew.chin@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has con­firmed that two more dengue-re­lat­ed deaths have been record­ed, bring­ing the na­tion’s to­tal num­ber of dengue deaths to 11. The con­firmed dengue in­fec­tion rate re­mains at 911.

The min­is­ter was speak­ing yes­ter­day fol­low­ing a Men's Health Ini­tia­tive that in­clud­ed prostate screen­ing or­gan­ised by the min­istry at Trinci­ty Mall.

Deyals­ingh ex­pressed dis­ap­point­ment that there has been a bla­tant dis­re­gard for peo­ple’s health by home­own­ers who are not clean­ing their prop­er­ties. This lack of com­pli­ance, Deyals­ingh said, will be dealt with as le­gal ac­tion will be tak­en against them.

“It’s un­for­tu­nate that a very sim­ple mea­sure that house­hold­ers can take, which is sim­ply to clear your yards and home and those small to medi­um con­tain­ers that we have to go this route, but the law is there and the law is go­ing to be ap­plied if we are to ar­rest the up­ward trends in both cas­es and deaths,” Deyals­ingh said. To save lives, Med­ical Chief of Staff Dr Ravi Lal­la high­light­ed the ef­fi­cien­cy of ear­ly dengue screen­ing cen­tres in help­ing the crit­i­cal­ly ill to sur­vive.

“The aim here is to bring peo­ple in ear­ly so that from ear­ly you can start to man­age them, test them, bring them back for a lot of re­views, and in so do­ing, pre­vent some­body from de­te­ri­o­rat­ing lat­er on in the course of their ill­ness, and that has been work­ing re­al­ly well. In fact, the on­ly cas­es we have that are sick­er are those who come in a lot lat­er,” Dr Lal­la said.

While a new vari­ant of the mon­key­pox (Mpox) virus has spread across sev­er­al coun­tries, in­clud­ing Swe­den and Thai­land, push­ing the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion last week to de­clare it a glob­al health emer­gency, Dey­las­ingh said that no known cas­es of the virus have been record­ed in T&T.

“Our sur­veil­lance sys­tems are in place; our iso­la­tion sys­tems are in place. We have ded­i­cat­ed 40 iso­la­tion spots across our health sys­tem in case we have to iso­late any­one with Mpox. The vac­cines are there, and the pro­to­cols are there,” Deyals­ingh said.

Scores of men turn out for prostate screen­ing

Yes­ter­day, scores of men came out to un­der­go prostate screen­ing at the Trinci­ty Mall event. Deyals­ingh said as a re­sult of this, the ex­er­cise will be widened. Guardian Me­dia ap­proached some of the men in line wait­ing for their turn to have a prostate screen­ing. Peo­ple al­so had the chance to get non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­ease screen­ing for blood sug­ar and blood pres­sure. Tetanus vac­ci­na­tions were al­so avail­able on-site.

“First, it’s free test­ing, and that’s most im­por­tant; when you reach my age, in your 50s, it’s im­por­tant so you down that so you don’t run in­to any prob­lems lat­er down in life,” Ker­win Ri­ley said. “Act now, rather than wait lat­er, when it would be cost­ly.”

An­oth­er man, Ja­son Scott, who is in his 50s, said, “It was ad­ver­tised, so I took an op­por­tu­ni­ty to come and check out my health.” It was the first time the two men went for a prostate screen­ing.