Dear Editor,
A little over two weeks after my appointment as Minister of Public Health I alerted President David Arthur Granger and several of my colleague ministers, about the outbreak of yellow fever in neighbouring Brazil and the need for contingency measures to be strengthened in Guyana to prevent or curtail its spread here.
In those pieces of correspondence, I presented an accurate picture of our country’s readiness to respond to the eventuality of an occurrence of yellow fever here. Currently our stock of yellow fever vaccines is below its critical level.
I informed them too that the Pan American Health Organisation/ World Health Organisation (PAHO/ WHO) “has promised to help us” due to the global shortage of the vaccine. As a temporary measure, the Minis-try of Citizenship in collaboration with Port Health was tasked with surveillance activity on the borders with Brazil and Suriname. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was requested to alert the Guyana Consulate and the “relevant diplomatic agencies in neighbouring countries about those measures”.
Former Health Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy, disappointingly, tried to maximise political mileage in his missive published in the letters section of Tuesday’s edition of the Kaieteur News.
His missive ignored the global context and realities when he avoided mentioning how global manufacturers behave when there is a yellow fever outbreak and given the shortage of the vaccines in Africa.
Manufacturers of the critical yellow fever vaccine are few; outside of the United States which manufactured the YF vaccine for domestic use, there are only five other manufacturers.
These are Bio-Mabguinhos Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Institute of Polio-myelitis and Viral Encephalitides in Moscow, Russia; Pasteur Institute of Dakar in Dakar, Senegal; Berna, in Berne, Switzerland (formerly produced at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany, and Sanofi Pasteur in Lyon, France).
Dr Ramsammy can recall that whenever there is an YF outbreak in any part of the world, manufacturers, historically, divert their supplies there, in an effort to prevent its spread to other parts of the globe. This is still true.
Guyana’s workers at the 103 immunisation sites nation-wide have always been doing their jobs to fight vaccine-preventable diseases. During the last five years, some 98 per cent of Guyanese children under the age of 5 have been immunised against YF.
In Lethem, Region 9 (Upper Takutu/Upper Essequibo), one of the areas vulnerable to the current outbreak in Brazil, the figure is the same for adults according to MOPH records.
Since June of 2016, the MOPH has dispensed some 20,000 doses of yellow fever vaccines to the adult population of the country. Currently, Guyana has YF vaccines to immunise all children below the age of 5, for emergencies involving adults and for unimmunised government and other officials who must travel overseas.
I wish to remind Guyanese that the YF vaccine is now valid for life as of 2016 and is no longer required to be taken every 10 years.
Guyana’s current challenge is to provide the critical vaccines for nationals travelling to neighbouring Suriname. Part of the solution can be a decision by the Surinamese administration to relax its demands that all Guyanese be immunised against YF as one pre-condition for entry.
I proffer this because I have been reliably informed that there has never been a yellow fever outbreak in Guyana although the mosquito which transmits YF is in Guyana and we are yet to confirm that animals here are free from the disease.
While we have had to implement some tough temporary short-term measures, the situation is expected to return to normalcy when the shipment of the YF vaccines arrives in the country some time next week.
Yours faithfully,
Volda Lawrence
Minister of Public Health
