AN ISOLATION FACILITY is the missing link in the health care system of Barbados, says Professor Eric van Gorp, head of the Department of Viroscience at Erasmus Medical Centre in The Netherlands.
Van Gorp, who was delivering a lecture on Exotic Infections In The Global Perspective last Friday at the auditorium of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, said even though the possibility of the Ebola outbreak reaching Barbados was small, other infectious diseases posed a big risk. These included the Nile virus, yellow fever and dengue.
Van Gorp said notwithstanding the lack of an isolation facility, there was enough knowledge on the island about the viruses.
“You need to educate staff because you do not want to have panic, but that people can take balanced decisions,” he said, while adding that there needed to be good knowledge, good data and good protocols in place. There also had to be arrangements to ensure services which were not available on the island could be accessed elsewhere, he said.
Dr Marquita Gittens-St Hilaire, of the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the University of the West Indies Cave Hill, spoke on dengue and chikungunya and Barbados’ experience with them.
Gittens-St Hilaire, who is also director of the Leptospiro Laboratory of the Ministry of Health, said there were more than 60 suspected cases of the chikungunya virus in Barbados and samples had been sent abroad to be tested.
She said seven cases had been confirmed, six of which were people from outside the island. (LK)
