The dengue fever threat could be over in just under two months as the summer rains begin to subside, the deputy chief medical officer in the Ministry of Health Delon Brennen told the Nassau Guardian.
He added yesterday during a press conference at the Ministry of Health, that while dengue hemorrhagic fever has symptoms of bleeding associated with it, one strain of the disease can also cause a drop in a person’s platelet count, which can also induce bleeding.
“What we have been trying to explain is that during the natural course of [the] dengue disease, people will have a drop in their platelet counts, and so you can have some minor bleeding that goes along with that,” he said.
“We have had episodes where people, because of their lowered platelet counts, will have blood like when they brush their teeth. If you have a minor injury you will see a little more bleeding then, but we haven’t had the true classic definition for dengue hemorrhagic fever.”
Brennen added that they are continuing to test for other mosquito borne illnesses such as malaria in order to be certain that the dengue symptoms are not masking other illnesses.
“We will continue to test those cases to ensure that we don’t have something else the dengue is covering up,” he said.
“We continue to do rapid testing for malaria in the country because we did have malaria in the past in one of our islands and we have had to be very vigilant about making sure that we don’t reintroduce malaria into the populous.”
One man who visited Nigeria recently tested positive for malaria and was hospitalized and treated upon his return to new Providence. Brennen said the man survived his ordeal.
He added that there have been no fatal cases of malaria in the Bahamas recently.
Brennen insisted that Bahamians in general, along with the Department of Environmental Health Services’ vector control team, have been doing their part to keep the mosquito population at bay during this summer’s dengue outbreak.
“The lucky thing is even without the rains going away we are optimistic that the declines we are seeing are because of the public,” he said.
He confirmed that the reported cases of dengue in new Providence have been decreasing and assured that as the Bahamas moves out of the summer rainy season at the end of October, mosquito breeding sites will decrease, minimizing the dengue threat.
Brennen also confirmed Tuesday that there have been some reported cases of dengue that appear to have the symptoms of the deadly hemorrhagic strain, though there have been no confirmed deaths from that particular strain of the disease. He said the number of hemorrhagic-like infections is less than ten.