A toddler and a teenaged female are among the malaria victims diagnosed in Exuma, the Director of Public Health Dr. Baldwin Carey reported to the Bahama Journal yesterday.
The 3-year-old, a 16-year- old female and males between the ages of 21 and 51 years comprise the list of confirmed cases, he said.
According to Health Minister Senator Dr. Bernard Nottage, the malaria victims are not being kept under quarantine.
“Some of them are in the [Princess Margaret Hospital]ﾅin a sense they are in a specific section of a ward. They are not in quarantine, they can be visited. But there are some persons who are being treated in Exuma,” he said.
The disclosure from health officials yesterday that the confirmed cases of malaria had grown since the initial revelation of the single case diagnosed last week, ignited worries, despite the assurance from the health minister that there was no need for alarm.
Malaria is transmitted through a bite from the female Anopheles mosquito which has the parasites in its body. The female only bites at night leaving health officials to advise residents to use insecticide spray and cover up exposed parts of their bodies.
Dr. Nottage said the health teams that have been deployed to Exuma have not found many mosquitoes of this species.
“When they go to do trapping, they expect to find hundreds of them,” he said. “So far in the adult mosquito they have only found one or two over the course of more than three weeks now. And they found the lava of the mosquito in one area, and some in another area over that period of time.”
He also said the counts of mosquitoes that are common to The Bahamas ﾖ the Culex and Aedes ﾖ are also low. The Department of Environment Health had been carrying out its traditional spraying and vector control programme throughout the country during the rainy season when there is a tendency for the mosquito population to increase.
Responding to concerns about a likely spread of the disease, Dr. Nottage said the possibility is “relatively low.”
“If it leaves Exuma, it would be because of someone who has malaria and doesnﾒt know it so it would most likely be someone who has traveled to a country where the disease is endemic and they got infected. We have a lot of people who travel to countries where malaria is endemic.”
The disease is not endemic in The Bahamas, according to the Ministry of Health.
Despite the current situation, the health minister said he did not believe that it was necessary for the screening of travelers into and out of Exuma.
He acknowledged that the movement of illegal migrants is another source of concern, as many of them tend to originate in Haiti where the disease is endemic. Officials, he said, are even looking at developing a policy to deal with the situation.
“We have immigrants traveling between Haiti and The Bahamas quite frequently so we are looking at what we can do to minimize transmission from that groupﾅThe people who we can deal with are the ones who we know are coming to The Bahamas.
The illegal immigrants come in [undercover ways] so they are a little bit more difficult to deal with but we are exploring various means of testing persons who come to The Bahamas from those countries where malaria is endemic and of informing Bahamians who travel to such countries to take preventative medication before they go and maybe even get tested when they come back.”
By: Stephen Gay, The Bahama Journal
