If you haven't gotten dengue, you definitely know someone who has, and there's a good chance that person is a family member. Based on purely anecdotal evidence, this year's outbreak seems to be particularly aggressive, and especially so in the urban areas of Belize City.
Nationally, three persons have died from what's known as Dengue shock - while clinics and hospital wards are full of persons reporting Dengue symptoms.
And while that scenario plays out in the real world, today the ministry of health and the KHMH administration - which have been mostly mute - came out from their offices in the antechamber of an epidemic to tell the public what everyone already knows: Dengue is a serious public health problem. What we weren't quite sure of is what they are doing to manage and contain it. Jim McFadzean found out.
Jim McFadzean, Reporting
Health officials along with the city council came together to make an official declaration that Dengue is now Public Enemy number one! And if that has the ring of overstatement, here's the official take on the state of this growing public health concern.
Dr. Bernard Bulwer, Dir. Medical Svcs., KHMH
"When someone shows up in our emergency department with symptoms that could be related to dengue whether it is a fever with the headache, with the generalized ache and pains, with retro-orbital pains, those are pains behind the eyes or pains when moving the eyes we do think dengue up front because we are in an outbreak."
Dr. Michael Pitts, Director Of Health Services
"Earlier on in the year we believe that the number of cases were following a similar pattern as to the previous year, but as we continued along we saw that there began to be some quantum leaps in the numbers."
The spike Dr Pitts refers to took place in the last two months. However, in June 7news reported on an increase in reported cases in the first three months of this year which was noted in an interview with one of the ministry's senior public health inspectors. So the question remains: are public health officials in the middle of a cover up?
Dr. Bernard Bulwer, Dir. Medical Svcs., KHMH
"Yes we are swamped in the number of cases but we do take the complaints of patient seriously. We are not in the business of cover-up; we are in the business of trying to help people to get well."
This morning the CEO of the country's largest medical institution that has become the epicentre for treatment of the disease found himself juggling concerns for the rising number of dengue cases and his medical staff's ability to deal effectively with the crisis.
Dr. Gary Longsworth, CEO, KHMH
"If you look at the literature, the literature will tell you that cases particularly which arrive in a tertiary care institution and especially those who end up in ICU. The case fatality rate can jump all the way up to 50% in those subsets of cases. So this is a disease that has the potential for fatal outcomes in many different situations. What we have experienced at the KHMH is a high rate of positive outcomes for the patients that we have managed. Of the 77 that we admitted, all but 3 went back out well."
And while the KHMH in the midst of today's official announcement of an outbreak is willing to pat itself on the back on the ability to keep Belize's fatality rate to a minimum of 3 percent based on total number of diagnosed cases, critics of the public health system and its lack of a cohesive plan to effectively address the crisis, makes this carefully choreographed public relations effort as too little too late.
Ms. Guerra, Ag. Regional Mgr., Central Hlth Region
"I must commend that we are working in partnership with all the other health partners, we have all the private sector, the laboratories actively reporting cases to us, we have added additional personnel to the vector unit here where we are actually going out now to different labs, hospitals to collect data. Because a few weeks ago we still were not getting some cases."
Wayne Usher, Belize City Councillor
"It is imperative that all the agencies that we are involved with us at the council put their shoulder to the wheel in this initiative and we are making sure that us councillors, we are heading out to make departmental interventions to make sure that it is done at the highest levels."
Reporting for Seven News, I'm Jim McFadzean.
According to the most recent statistics from the Ministry of Health, as of the end of July, there were a total of 807 cases of diagnosed dengue, 79 of which have been diagnosed as Dengue Haemorraghic. The Belize and Cayo districts continue to show the greatest number of cases....
