De­spite not­ing an in­crease in dengue cas­es across the re­gion, the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (Carpha) does not be­lieve it’s a cause for con­cern.

It is, how­ev­er, urg­ing the pub­lic to con­tin­ue prac­tic­ing pre­ven­tion mea­sures by not on­ly re­duc­ing breed­ing sites, but by clean­ing up the sur­round­ings of neigh­bours as well.

Carpha’s new ad in­ter­im ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor Dr Lisa In­dar yes­ter­day ac­knowl­edged T&T’s ef­forts in try­ing to man­age the spread of the dead­ly virus.

Dr In­dar was speak­ing at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of Carpha’s re­gion­al stake­hold­er con­sul­ta­tion work­shop on the Pan­dem­ic Fund Project held at Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre yes­ter­day.

On Fri­day, the Min­istry of Health (MoH) re­vealed there are 635 con­firmed lab­o­ra­to­ry cas­es of dengue and five con­firmed deaths.

How­ev­er, pri­vate med­ical in­sti­tu­tions are not ob­lig­at­ed to re­port dengue cas­es to the min­istry, and Carpha’s da­ta on­ly re­flects what is pro­vid­ed by the min­istry.

Dr In­dar al­so de­clined com­ment­ing on whether T&T had the high­est num­ber of dengue cas­es in the re­gion.

Dr In­dar said, “At this time, we ex­pect dengue and oth­er ar­bovi­ral dis­eases as you have the rainy sea­son, so the in­creas­ing trend that we’re see­ing in the re­gion is some­thing that we ex­pect. Com­mu­ni­ty clean-up is im­por­tant so if there’s any­thing I want to stress, it’s that you may clean your en­vi­ron­ment but the neigh­bour’s back­yard or the drains are not clean, so those are the things we’re stress­ing for every­one.”

“My mes­sage to per­sons is to en­gage in the pre­ven­tion mea­sures. One thing that Trinidad and To­ba­go is do­ing and do­ing well is that they’re be­ing very trans­par­ent. They’re test­ing. They’re do­ing the sur­veil­lance, so we re­al­ly have to ap­plaud Trinidad and To­ba­go to be able to do that... For us, we are go­ing to keep sup­port­ing. We are see­ing trends go­ing up, not just here (Trinidad and To­ba­go) but oth­er places. I wouldn’t say con­cern, but our strat­e­gy is to keep work­ing with the coun­tries.” She added.

Pan­dem­ic fund

The US$16 mil­lion fund was made pos­si­ble through an In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) grant.

The fund aims to fi­nance crit­i­cal in­vest­ments to strength­en re­gion­al pan­dem­ic pre­ven­tion, pre­pared­ness and re­sponse ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

Asked if Carpha is pre­pared for an­oth­er pan­dem­ic, Dr In­dar replied, “We are not pre­pared as yet. Carpha would have learnt and COVID-19 would have showed us, there were gaps, many gaps. Gaps in terms of elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance sys­tems. The big thing for the Caribbean if you’re mov­ing very quick­ly be­tween coun­tries you need to know some­thing re­al-time, so we lack func­tion­al re­al-time ear­ly warn­ing sys­tems.”

She added that Carpha will al­so be fo­cused on ad­vo­cat­ing to en­sure eq­ui­table dis­tri­b­u­tion of vac­cines in the event of an­oth­er pan­dem­ic.