REGIONAL Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) will be presenting a protocol, to guide the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in dealing with the H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic, at the upcoming Heads of Government Summit.

A press statement from the CARICOM Secretariat said the CMOs are presently devising the Port Health Protocol for the influenza virus for presentation at next week’s 13th meeting of the Heads of Government.

The statement said the belief of the CMOs that countries need to be extremely cautious with the H1N1 virus prompted the drafting of the document.

They are also concerned about the effect of the H1N1 virus on the vital foreign exchange earning tourism sector, the statement pointed out.

Programme Manager for Health Sector Development at the CARICOM Secretariat, Dr. Rudolph Cummings disclosed that, when the CMOs met recently for an emergency session, they had did so with the intention of devising guidelines for tourists moving across the region by sea.

He pointed to the case of cruise ship passengers who had shown symptoms of the disease and were denied entry to Barbados, Grenada and Saint Lucia, the statement informed.

”So many of our countries in the region are heavily dependent on tourism, including cruise ship passengers and this poses some challenges in dealing with the H1N1 Virus. We wouldn’t want to take action that may, ultimately, damage our economies.

“Cruise ship passengers move across multiple countries on a single voyage. In our region, the issue of the capacity of public health systems to deal with a single patient requiring intensive care comes into play when one considers the large numbers of persons cruise ships are known to carry,” Cummings said.

He added that, given the ease of spread of the virus, the CMOs agreed, as well, to examine common protocols for dealing with airline passengers, too, noting that Caribbean countries need to be mindful of the internationally agreed ones, as set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to deal with the H1N1 virus.

Cummings cautioned against over-reaction which could lead to persons bringing the public health system to a standstill.

The former Guyana CMO said the CMOs will continue to follow the region-wide procedures that were agreed, in May, at the 18th Meeting of the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD).

Challenges

The statement said that, at the COHSOD forum, a report delivered by the Caribbean Epidemiology Centre (CAREC) acknowledged some initial challenges confronting the regional health sector in monitoring this virus.

It added that, among the challenges, were limited human resource capacity, procurement of supplies, lack of reserves and specimen transfers and contamination.

The statement said, against that background, COHSOD decided that more vigorous efforts should be made to update existing national plans to a state of readiness.

It added that this will serve to strengthen surveillance and would be done under the guidance of the Caucus of Ministers of Health and in consultation with Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), so as to establish and sustain a more effective and efficient Caribbean laboratory network.

To this end, therefore, CAREC and the collaborating centre at University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus, in Jamaica, were designated as two reference laboratory facilities, fully equipped to do the confirmatory testing required for identifying the type of influenza virus.

It was further agreed that, once initial cases had been detected, the surveillance should move towards monitoring severe acute respiratory infection and the less severe cases would then be defined by history of association.
The statement said further regional collaboration would be done with the Institute Pasteur, the world-famous French biomedical research organisation which focuses on the prevention and treatment of diseases worldwide.