More suspected Chikungunya cases being tested

Dr Marquita Gittens-St Hilaire

There are now more than 60 suspected cases of the Chikungunya virus in Barbados.

However, the number of confirmed cases remains at seven.

This information was provided last evening by Dr Marquita Gittens-St Hilaire of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Faculty of Medical Sciences, during a special UWI lecture on Dengue and Chikungunya: the Barbados Experience.

“Six were imported and one was homegrown – that [means] that someone who didn’t have any travel history developed Chikungunya. These occurred in the middle portion of the year. So on the 3^rd June we detected one imported case,” she explained during the activity held at the auditorium of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

“On the 4^th of July, there were three imported and on the 22^nd of July we discovered that there was one local and two imported cases. So currently we are still sending samples off to be tested”, she added.

During the activity, another lecture was given on the topic Exotic Infections in the Global Perspective by Professor Eric van Gorp of the Department of Viroscience, Erasmus MC, Netherlands.