An­drea Perez-Sobers
and An­na-Lisa Paul

As the num­ber of dengue cas­es con­tin­ues to in­crease, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says T&T is in an “out­break sit­u­a­tion.”

With the num­ber of con­firmed cas­es hav­ing al­ready crossed 820 and eight con­firmed deaths record­ed, he said in­fec­tion num­bers were high­er than in pre­vi­ous years, which meant the sit­u­a­tion could be clas­si­fied as a dengue out­break.

Speak­ing with re­porters in Champs Fleurs yes­ter­day, Deyals­ingh said, “We have had more cas­es this year than the pre­vi­ous years since 2017 to now. The last time we had these num­bers would have been high­er than 2014 and 2017, so we are in an out­break sit­u­a­tion, but it is dif­fi­cult to project and pre­dict where it is go­ing to go. “We are do­ing a lot at the gov­ern­men­tal lev­el, at the lo­cal gov­ern­men­tal lev­el, and we are en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to do their part.”

Even though no of­fi­cial state­ment has yet been is­sued con­firm­ing there is an out­break, the min­is­ter en­cour­aged the pub­lic to come and get test­ed at the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal as soon as pos­si­ble.

Re­fer­ring to the set-up at Cou­va, he re­vealed that 176 peo­ple pre­sent­ed them­selves for test­ing in the last week.

De­clar­ing this was good, he said, “Out of that, 16 were ward­ed,” as he urged peo­ple to make use of the fa­cil­i­ty. He added, “We have a sim­i­lar fa­cil­i­ty at San­gre Grande, and a sim­i­lar fa­cil­i­ty will be launched at St James.”

‘Pre­pare for Mpox’

And as T&T moves to re­duce the spread of dengue fever, Deyals­ingh urged cit­i­zens to pre­pare for the bat­tle against the Mpox virus. He said the 2022 out­break, which was en­dem­ic to West Africa, was dif­fer­ent from what is hap­pen­ing now, as this was a dif­fer­ent vari­a­tion that was en­dem­ic to Cen­tral Africa.

So with two dif­fer­ent types of the virus en­dem­ic to two dif­fer­ent parts of Africa, he ad­vised that the 2022 vari­ant is main­ly trans­mit­ted through close in­ti­mate sex­u­al con­tact, while this one was more trans­mis­si­ble as it in­clud­ed non-in­ti­mate modes of trans­mis­sion.

Deyals­ingh warned, “What they are find­ing is that many more chil­dren are be­ing af­fect­ed.”

In­di­cat­ing the cur­rent case fa­tal­i­ty ra­tio was be­tween three and five per cent, he ex­plained this meant it was much more fa­tal.

“With Wednes­day, when WHO is­sued their emer­gency call, at that time it was on­ly found in Africa. Since then, there has been one im­port­ed case in Swe­den and one im­port­ed case in Pak­istan. It has al­so been found in ten pre­vi­ous­ly African coun­tries that pre­vi­ous­ly did not have Mpox.”

He said T&T had stepped up tem­per­a­ture screen­ing at all ports of en­try and would be work­ing with in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies to scru­ti­nise pas­sen­ger man­i­fests for peo­ple who have been to Africa.

Test­ing for Mpox will be done at the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) via a PCR, and the turn-around time for the re­sults is be­tween 48 and 72 hours. Re­gard­ing the vac­ci­na­tion of peo­ple against Mpox, Deyals­ingh said the coun­try had 2,800 two-dose Bavar­i­an Nordic vac­cines, which meant 1,400 peo­ple could be im­mu­nised.

He said they were not mov­ing to vac­ci­nate the pop­u­la­tion and would ad­min­is­ter vac­cines on­ly if and when an in­fec­tion oc­curred.

But he begged, “Let us not make the same mis­take we made in COVID, where we stock­piled vac­cines and then had to throw them away, and Africa could not get a vac­cine. Through this medi­um, through Trinidad and To­ba­go’s voice, I am lend­ing my voice to the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to share vac­cines at no cost to Africa. We must make sure the African con­ti­nent is se­cure.”