A team of health officials from the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. will be assisting Guam in its enhanced surveillance for Zika and other diseases as delegates and visitors from all over the Pacific are coming to the island for the 2016 Festival of the Pacific Arts.<\/p>\n
According to state epidemiologist Dr. Paul White, they have a team to help Guam\u2019s Department of Public Health and Social Services.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re sending a very big team to Guam Public Health,\u201d White told Saipan Tribune, \u201cAnd we\u2019ll be there for the duration to work with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and the U.S. Centers on Disease Control and Prevention on an enhancement surveillance system that Guam put in place.\u201d<\/p>\n
White said they will have a daily collection of syndromic data which is a \u201cpicture of signs and symptoms that people might present with for some diseases.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll be doing it daily for two weeks,\u201d White said. <\/p>\n
White said sending a team will be beneficial not only for Guam but for the CNMI as well as it will \u201cgive us an insight to what they\u2019re doing and what risks they\u2019re seeing.\u201d <\/p>\n
According to White, Guam has been doing a lot of vector control prior to the arrival of the delegates and visitors for FestPac which officially opened yesterday.<\/p>\n
Some of the countries that are in the Pacific and among those who will be participating has had a history of zika, most of which from the South Pacific, White said.<\/p>\n
The World Health Organization currently lists countries with active Zika cases in the Pacific, which includes American Samoa, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, and Tonga.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is obviously a potential, just a potential, that someone travelling from those islands will take it with them,\u201d White said.<\/p>\n
White said they also met with the CNMI delegation for FestPac before they left for Guam for health reminders. They also put up informational flyers at the airports.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have produced a flyer that outlines six key messages that is going on the airport here and on Rota and we\u2019ll go out to every outbound flight until the end of FestPac,\u201d White said.<\/p>\n
The key messages include proper washing of hands, sneeze and cough etiquette, sun-smart tips, fighting the bite, safe sex, and food handling and safety tips.<\/p>\n
Although a recent vector survey in the CNMI showed that there are no Aedes Aegypti\u2014the main vector or species responsible for the transmission of zika, dengue, and chikungunya viruses\u2014on all three inhabited islands, White said it still doesn\u2019t eliminate the risk of transmission.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis information doesn\u2019t reduce the risk of someone coming in, but it reduces the risk of transmission if it occurs, which is encouraging. But reducing it doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s eliminated,\u201d White said. <\/p>\n
White said the information was \u201cencouraging\u201d and will be helpful to understand how transmission patters will be once an active case gets introduced to the island.<\/p>\n
While the survey showed that most of the water samples taken from water containers or stagnant water in the environment showed that there were mosquito species, it showed that it was mostly Aedes Albopictus that is present in the CNMI\u2014species that mainly feeds on and prefers animals than humans. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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