Health Ministry urges flu vaccination ahead of Carnival

BRENT PIN­HEIRO

brent.pin­[email protected]

In just over a month, peo­ple from all over the world will come to Trinidad and To­ba­go for the great­est show on earth. But if you’ve lit­er­al­ly got the Car­ni­val fever right now, well, it may be more than just the rum and Co­ca-Co­la to blame for that.

That’s right. It is flu sea­son here in T&T, and with so­cial dis­tanc­ing all but a rel­ic of the pan­dem­ic era, the Min­istry of Health is urg­ing the pop­u­la­tion to get vac­ci­nat­ed.

The warn­ing comes as flu cas­es surge in the Unit­ed States and doc­tor vis­its there spike to their high­est lev­els since 1997.

“The Min­istry of Health is aware of re­ports emerg­ing from the Unit­ed States re­gard­ing in­creased in­fluen­za ac­tiv­i­ty,” the Min­istry said in a state­ment to Guardian Me­dia. “With the in­creased so­cial ac­tiv­i­ties for the Car­ni­val sea­son, we con­tin­ue to en­cour­age mem­bers of the pub­lic… to avail them­selves of the in­fluen­za vac­cine as ear­ly as pos­si­ble.”

While sub-clade K—a new­ly iden­ti­fied flu strain—is re­spon­si­ble for all but four U.S. states re­port­ing high or very high flu ac­tiv­i­ty, a dif­fer­ent strain is cir­cu­lat­ing here at home.

The health min­istry says, based on avail­able epi­demi­o­log­i­cal da­ta, In­fluen­za B (Vic­to­ria lin­eage) is the dom­i­nant strain in T&T. Symp­toms in­clude fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, fa­tigue and headache.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions sent via What­sApp, the Min­istry told Guardian Me­dia that while it has seen an in­crease in in­fluen­za, it has not ob­served any “un­usu­al sever­i­ty” be­yond what is ex­pect­ed for the sea­son.

The flu sea­son typ­i­cal­ly runs from Oc­to­ber to May, with peak ac­tiv­i­ty be­tween De­cem­ber and March.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, up­take has been slow de­spite the vac­cine be­ing free. Of the 65,000 dos­es pro­cured by the gov­ern­ment for the cur­rent flu sea­son, on­ly 15,000 have been ad­min­is­tered so far. The Min­istry says it will con­tin­ue to of­fer the vac­cine free of charge at all pub­lic health cen­tres.

To reach more peo­ple with the vac­cines, it al­so has launched an out­reach pro­gramme across Trinidad. Over the next three weeks, the Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties will host ad­di­tion­al vac­ci­na­tion sites at sev­er­al lo­ca­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry, in­fluen­za virus­es can un­der­go ge­net­ic changes, but the sea­son­al in­fluen­za vac­cine re­mains ef­fec­tive in re­duc­ing the risk of se­vere ill­ness, com­pli­ca­tions, hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tion and even death.

The Min­istry as­sures, how­ev­er, that of­fi­cials re­main alert and con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor in­fluen­za-like ill­ness across the health sys­tem.