RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says con­firmed dengue cas­es have risen to 911, with deaths re­main­ing at eight, while coun­ty Vic­to­ria ac­counts for 52.82 per cent of all cas­es na­tion­al­ly.

A break­down of sta­tis­tics pro­vid­ed by the Min­is­ter shows St Patrick coun­ty hav­ing 15.93 per cent—the sec­ond high­est num­ber of cas­es—while coun­ty Ca­roni has the third high­est with 12.50 per cent of cas­es.

Oth­er coun­ties, in­clud­ing St An­drew and St David, ac­count for 2.22 per cent of cas­es; St George East has 8.27 per cent; St George West has 1.61 per cent while To­ba­go has 4.03 per cent of all cas­es.

Re­spond­ing to crit­i­cism from Oropouche East MP Dr Roodal Mooni­lal, who ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of mis­man­ag­ing the out­break, Deyals­ingh ques­tioned his claims that dengue was pre­ventable.

“If dengue is pre­ventable, why was there an out­break un­der the UNC in 2014 when ten to 14 per­sons died?” he asked.

Deyals­ingh al­so high­light­ed the glob­al rise in dengue cas­es, stat­ing, “If it is pre­ventable, then why is there a 300 per cent glob­al in­crease in cas­es? I will again send the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion re­port on this.”

Deyals­ingh re­it­er­at­ed the Gov­ern­ment’s com­mit­ment to man­ag­ing dengue ef­fec­tive­ly. He ac­cused the Op­po­si­tion of politi­cis­ing the is­sue, not­ing, “When in Op­po­si­tion, I did not politi­cise Chikun­gun­ya or Ebo­la as I un­der­stood the sci­ence and al­so un­der­stood that as a coun­try, we need to be unit­ed in these fights to save lives.”

He al­so ref­er­enced Mooni­lal’s pre­vi­ous state­ment against the COVID-19 vac­cine, say­ing, “Re­mem­ber it was the same Mooni­lal who told peo­ple not to be guinea pigs by tak­ing the COVID vac­cine. How many peo­ple died due to that reck­less state­ment?”

The Min­istry re­vealed in a state­ment on Wednes­day that they had is­sued 503 yel­low fever no­tices to prop­er­ty own­ers, in­struct­ing them to clean up their sur­round­ings. Six­teen prop­er­ty own­ers are cur­rent­ly un­der con­sid­er­a­tion for le­gal ac­tion due to non-com­pli­ance.

The Min­istry re­mind­ed the pub­lic that dengue fever is spread by the bite of an in­fect­ed Aedes ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­to. Symp­toms in­clude fever, se­vere headaches, pain be­hind the eyes, mus­cle and joint pain, skin rash, nau­sea, vom­it­ing, and di­ar­rhoea. The pub­lic is urged to seek im­me­di­ate med­ical at­ten­tion if they ex­pe­ri­ence any symp­toms.