An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

As the coun­try record­ed its fourth dengue death, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh again ap­pealed to the pub­lic to clean their sur­round­ings.

The Health Min­istry con­firmed the fourth death in a me­dia news re­lease yes­ter­day but gave no de­tails about the vic­tim. Cur­rent­ly, there are 392 lab­o­ra­to­ry-con­firmed cas­es of dengue.

Deyals­ingh ex­pressed his con­do­lences to the fam­i­ly and urged the pub­lic to en­sure their sur­round­ings are clean.

“It must be em­pha­sised that this type of sit­u­a­tion goes in a cy­cle of every sev­en to ten years and the last time we had a death from dengue in T&T was in 2017. So, this is con­sis­tent with what PA­HO, and WHO have been say­ing. The re­sponse since Feb­ru­ary is get­ting house­hold­ers to help the Gov­ern­ment by clean­ing the sur­round­ings,” he ex­plained.

The min­is­ter point­ed out that if the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions spray for dengue it is a dan­ger to hu­man health, an­i­mals, and the ecosys­tem.

“Al­so, over-spray­ing leads to re­sis­tance in the mos­qui­toes. When­ev­er you overuse any chem­i­cal re­sis­tance will be built up and that is why we are ap­peal­ing to the cit­i­zen­ry to help us by clean­ing your sur­round­ings,” he said.

At a news con­fer­ence on Fri­day, Deyals­ingh said the dengue out­break will not be de­clared a pub­lic health emer­gency, as it does not meet the in­ter­na­tion­al cri­te­ria for such an event.

Deyals­ingh said the ar­eas most af­fect­ed were Coun­ties Vic­to­ria, St Patrick, and Caronu and the Health Min­istry, coun­ty med­ical of­fi­cers of health (CMOH) and In­sect Vec­tor Con­trol Di­vi­sion (IVCD) are do­ing their best to con­trol the out­break, with re­sources be­ing con­cen­trat­ed in those ar­eas.

Deyals­ingh re­mind­ed that there’s an over $3000 fine in place for peo­ple whose premis­es are found to be breed­ing grounds if they have not cleaned it up af­ter be­ing warned by the au­thor­i­ties.

Tabaquite MP Ani­ta Haynes-Al­leyne com­plained that dengue cas­es had risen sharply in her con­stituen­cy and ap­pealed for im­me­di­ate help to tack­le the grow­ing pub­lic health cri­sis.

“The mos­qui­to prob­lem has sky­rock­et­ed, and it’s wor­ry­ing, es­pe­cial­ly so ear­ly in the rainy sea­son,” she said

“My of­fice and the lo­cal re­gion­al coun­cil are flood­ed with re­quests for mos­qui­to spray­ing, and we’re hear­ing about more and more cas­es of dengue af­fect­ing fam­i­lies and neigh­bour­hoods.”

She said Tabaquite seems to be among the hard­est-hit ar­eas.

De­spite ef­forts by the Cou­va/Tabaquite/Tal­paro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion to spray for mos­qui­toes, Haynes-Al­leyne said there were chal­lenges due to lim­it­ed re­sources.

“We on­ly have one fog­ging ma­chine for a large area like Ca­roni Dis­trict. We ur­gent­ly need more equip­ment, man­pow­er and bet­ter da­ta sup­port from the Gov­ern­ment to ef­fec­tive­ly fight this out­break,” she said.