And in terms of other infectious diseases, we received reports of a case of Tuberculosis at one of the high schools in the city. Reports say that one case of a 16 year old female testing positive for tuberculosis was confirmed at EP Yorke High School on February 14th.
As a precautionary measure, students in her class are being tested and were required to wear masks to school. The results will be known in three days.
Musa says that there is an average of 75 cases confirmed in Belize annually:
Dr Melissa Diaz Musa, Director of Public Health & Wellness
"Tuberculosis is a disease that we have a very strong program that is ongoing we have had in country a handful of patients annually with tuberculosis and it is something that still holds a significant stigma to the diagnosis and I would like to inform the general public that even though tuberculosis is infectious we do have a vaccine the BCG vaccine that is a vaccine that is given on the first week of birth we have a high rate of uptake of our vaccines it has traditionally been over 95% the last year or 2 post covid it has fallen to about 90% in our country. So the majority of us are vaccinated against tuberculosis with the BCG vaccine. In addition to this there are, there is readily available treatment under the ministry of health and wellness. Once the person has been diagnosed and somebody has been isolated we have procedures that we would do and we would always go into wherever the workplace, the schools and we wouldn't educate the parents, educate the students and teachers and we do general testing. Many times when you see that we do have a health fair at school or health fair in different areas the TB testing for TB is one of the services that we offer so we always encourage people to get tested because sometimes you could have what's known as latent TB so you were exposed and you never showed significant symptoms but you might still need medication and then there is active TB where you have symptoms like night sweats, weight loss some people have fever, severe cough etc. And the important thing to note about tuberculosis is that while it is infectious we are covered, the majority of our population is covered with the BCG vaccine and the treatment after less than 2, after about 2 weeks of treatment you are considered non infectious although the treatment lasts a bit longer and it is something that many of our schools are in open air it is something that is not easily transmitted and so we want to encourage the general public not to be fearful of tuberculosis and we want to remove that stigma of tuberculosis and we want to encourage the public to ensure that they have their uptake of BCG and ensure that they babies get vaccinated timely."
