Two weeks af­ter it was found that mon­keys are dy­ing from yel­low fever, the Min­istry of Health has ramped up its yel­low fever vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve, in­oc­u­lat­ing al­most 200 cit­i­zens in a fort­night.

How­ev­er, there are still be­tween 800 to 900 peo­ple who are yet to re­ceive their yel­low-fever vac­cines.

Speak­ing at the Min­istry of Health’s press brief­ing on Wednes­day, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer of Health, Dr Roshan Paras­ram said he has been li­ais­ing close­ly with Coun­ty Med­ical of­fi­cers to en­sure that vac­ci­na­tions are done.

“When we first raised the is­sue of yel­low fever we had cov­er­age of 89.2 per cent. Sub­se­quent­ly, I met all the CMO’s to put strate­gies in place to get that num­ber up as quick­ly as pos­si­ble,” he said.

He not­ed that pub­lic health of­fi­cials were able to pull the med­ical notes of cit­i­zens to de­ter­mine who did not get vac­ci­nat­ed and with­in two weeks a to­tal of 192 peo­ple were vac­ci­nat­ed.

“This got the fig­ure to 90.4 per cent,” Dr Paras­ram said.

How­ev­er, he added, “The to­tal num­ber yet to get the yel­low fever vac­cine is 800 to 900 per­sons. When this is done we will get 100 per cent, not 95 per cent which is what the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion rec­om­mends,” Dr Paras­ram added.

In late Feb­ru­ary, Lab­o­ra­to­ry test­ing by the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) con­firmed the howler mon­keys in South Trinidad were dy­ing from the yel­low fever virus.

The virus is trans­mit­ted to peo­ple main­ly through the bite of an in­fect­ed mos­qui­to of the Aedes or Haem­a­gogus species. The mos­qui­toes can then spread the virus to hu­mans. How­ev­er, there has nev­er been a hu­man case of Yel­low Fever in the coun­try since 1979.

Chil­dren are usu­al­ly giv­en the vac­cine at age one and one in­oc­u­la­tion pro­vides life­long pro­tec­tion.

Peo­ple who have not re­ceived the vac­cine should vis­it their near­est pub­lic health cen­tre.