An­na-Lisa Paul

Se­nior Re­porter

an­na-lisa.paul@guardian.co.tt

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les is stand­ing be­hind an as­sur­ance from the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) that the wa­ter sup­ply in the Mara­cas-St Joseph com­mu­ni­ty is not con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed.

Of­fi­cials from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean (USC), Mara­cas Roy­al Road, St Joseph, yes­ter­day claimed sev­er­al stu­dents, as well as aca­d­e­m­ic staff, had ex­pe­ri­enced bouts of vom­it­ing and di­ar­rhoea through­out Fri­day and yes­ter­day.

In a re­lease, the USC ad­vised the cam­pus com­mu­ni­ty that peo­ple who had ex­pe­ri­enced the de­bil­i­tat­ing episodes had been pro­vid­ed with med­ical as­sis­tance.

Of­fi­cials said af­fect­ed peo­ple were “re­ceiv­ing the nec­es­sary care and are be­ing close­ly mon­i­tored.”

They added, “As part of our re­sponse, we have in­ten­si­fied sani­ti­sa­tion ef­forts across cam­pus and have im­ple­ment­ed ad­di­tion­al health and safe­ty mea­sures.” The cam­pus said all mem­bers and vis­i­tors to the fa­cil­i­ty would be en­cour­aged to in­crease their hand and face wash­ing at this time.

They urged peo­ple to re­main alert and re­port any symp­toms or health con­cerns to the uni­ver­si­ty clin­ic im­me­di­ate­ly. There were al­so un­con­firmed re­ports that oth­er peo­ple in the com­mu­ni­ty were com­plain­ing of feel­ing un­well. USC said it was ac­tive­ly in­ves­ti­gat­ing the cause of this in­ci­dent in col­lab­o­ra­tion with health pro­fes­sion­als and oth­er rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties, as they were com­mit­ted to iden­ti­fy­ing the source and tak­ing all nec­es­sary mea­sures to ad­dress the sit­u­a­tion. Gon­za­les said they too were con­tin­u­ing to con­duct ex­ten­sive in­ves­ti­ga­tions. Ad­dress­ing con­cerns at the launch of the GOES 16 Satel­lite in Pi­ar­co yes­ter­day, Gon­za­les said tests done on var­i­ous sam­ples tak­en from the Llu­en­go Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant, Mara­cas-St Joseph, that serves the catch­ment area, re­vealed, “That there was ab­solute­ly no con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of the wa­ter.”

He said, “It re­mained con­sis­tent with WHO stan­dards.” Gon­za­les said fol­low­ing brief dis­cus­sions with Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, who had been ap­prised by of­fi­cials from the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex, Mt Hope, “They did not re­port any un­usu­al oc­cur­rence of per­sons com­ing in­to the hos­pi­tal fa­cil­i­ty suf­fer­ing from med­ical con­di­tions that sug­gest there may have been con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of the wa­ter.”

While he is not dis­miss­ing pub­lic con­cerns and fears, Gon­za­les said it was strange that it had been at­trib­uted to the qual­i­ty of the wa­ter. Nev­er­the­less, he said, “We did not take it for grant­ed.”

In­di­cat­ing sev­er­al par­lia­men­tary col­leagues have con­tin­ued to pay close at­ten­tion to the sit­u­a­tion, Gon­za­les said sam­ples had been tak­en from ten dif­fer­ent points and test­ed in­di­vid­u­al­ly, but no traces of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion have so far been found.