Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh in­sists that there are suf­fi­cient tests for pa­tients dis­play­ing dengue-like symp­toms in pub­lic hos­pi­tals. 

Speak­ing af­ter the han­dover of on­col­o­gy di­ag­nos­tic and imag­ing ma­chines do­nat­ed to the min­istry at the Can­cer Cen­tre in the St James Med­ical Com­plex over the week­end, the min­is­ter said there was a mis­con­cep­tion in the pub­lic that there is a spe­cif­ic, quick dengue test. 

“There is none. What the doc­tors do is they look at your clin­i­cal signs and symp­toms and they take what is a com­plete blood count. From that, a di­ag­no­sis is formed,” he ex­plained.

He said if you need a fur­ther test, it can be sent to the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency for a PCR test. 

Deyals­ingh said what the pub­lic wants and some Op­po­si­tion MPs have been talk­ing about is a rapid di­ag­nos­tic test. 

While such a test has its use, Deyals­ingh said “It al­so has its lim­i­ta­tions and it’s an in­ac­cu­rate test. It gives you a lot of false neg­a­tives.” 

For this rea­son, Deyals­ingh said, the min­istry has re­frained from us­ing it. 

Al­so speak­ing on the mat­ter was North­west Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NWRHA) chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer An­tho­ny who said there is a fa­cil­i­ty at the St James Med­ical Com­plex where they specif­i­cal­ly treat peo­ple ex­pe­ri­enc­ing dengue symp­toms. 

“We have seen hun­dreds of peo­ple at this fa­cil­i­ty al­ready and it has start­ed to re­duce, and we are see­ing be­tween 15 to 20 peo­ple dai­ly com­ing to re­ceive that ser­vice and what that has al­so done for us is re­duce the load on our Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency de­part­ment both at Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al and at the St James Med­ical Com­plex,” Blake added. 

Dengue has claimed the lives of 13 peo­ple, so far for the year in this coun­try.  

A re­lease from the Health Min­istry last Fri­day stat­ed there were an ad­di­tion­al 262 lab­o­ra­to­ry-con­firmed cas­es of dengue fever, bring­ing the new to­tal to 1,315 to date. 

The min­istry added that as of Sep­tem­ber 5, a to­tal of 914 yel­low fever no­tices were is­sued to prop­er­ty own­ers/oc­cu­piers, di­rect­ing them to clean up their sur­round­ings.