Havana/The count of patients with arboviruses in Cuba continues to rise and will continue to do so in the coming weeks, according to the health authorities themselves. This Wednesday, the Ministry of Public Health reported 870 new cases registered on Tuesday, 628 of chikungunya and 242 dengue. This represents a decrease in chikungunya compared to the previous day, when 934 cases were detected, but a considerable increase in dengue, of which 66 cases were reported.
As explained on state television by the Director of Environmental Health of the Ministry, Susana Suárez, the accumulated number of people with “non-specific febrile syndrome”, the first common warning symptom of both arboviruses, amounts to 45,617, of which 35,452 have subsequently been diagnosed with chikungunya. It follows that the vast majority of the remaining 10,165 are cases of dengue, although there may also be patients with oropouche or other unidentified diseases.
These figures do not in any way foresee the patients who do not set foot in a health center. Like Tony, brother of a Cuban resident in Miami, who worriedly tells this newspaper how the young man “has fallen with the virus.” Which? He doesn’t know: “There he is lying in bed with a fever of 40º that doesn’t subside, and he says that half of his body doesn’t respond. His wife tells me that he spent the night delirious.” His brother immediately advised him to visit a doctor, to which Tony replied: “What’s the point? The hospitals are full and there’s nothing.”
The Ministry of Health is defining the cases mainly by their symptoms, without carrying out massive tests that clinically confirm the presence of the disease, as explained by the health authorities themselves. Suárez also pointed out that currently 64 of the 101 patients in intensive care due to complications associated with these diseases are minors.
To care for these patients, among the most “vulnerable to the disease”, the Government has instructed “to reinforce actions”
To care for these patients, among those most “vulnerable to the disease,” the Government has instructed “to reinforce actions.” In a meeting with doctors, scientists and health officials, in which the president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and the prime minister, Manuel Marrero, were present, the specialists warned that chikungunya is “a serious disease” in the neonatal period, and that, according to data analyzed from Brazil, mortality can be up to 10% and the consequences can occur in 20% of survivors.
“Every child under two years of age is admitted, simply because we must protect our population and we know that these are the most vulnerable,” declared one of the doctors who spoke at the meeting.
In this regard, Tania Roing Álvarez, head of the National Neonatology Group, said that “the first step was a broad review of the issue at an international level, since in Cuba there was no history of the disease.” That is to say, the diagnostic protocols for chikungunya, the newest of the diseases that have spread on the Island, are being reviewed.
This has made it possible to verify something worrying: that “transmission can be vertical (from mother to child) or by mosquito bites” and that “the risk of transmission to offspring is high if the mother is in a period of viremia during childbirth.”
For his part, Raúl Guinovart Díaz, doctor of Sciences – whose name became known during the covid-19 pandemic for his accurate forecasts – asserted that the upward trend in infections will continue. “What all these models that we have analyzed confirm is that at the moment the trend is towards a growth of the epidemic and a maintenance of the growth of febrile cases and fundamentally of arboviruses,” he declared at the meeting.
Díaz-Canel’s intervention in the same place was limited to asking scientists to confront the disease “with intelligence and creativity.”
The epidemic, a term used for the first time by the Government on November 12 to characterize the current outbreak of these two diseases, has found fertile ground in Cuba to spread months after the first infections were detected last July in Matanzas.
