Officials review how Belize remains free of flu pandemic

Ever wonder how Belize has managed to dodge the Influenza A H1N1 pandemic? Well, you’re not alone. The flu has swept the world and its epicentre sits in neighbouring Mexico, yet not a single case has been confirmed in the jewel. Doctors Michael Pitts and Peter Allen from the Ministry of Health appeared this morning on Open Your Eyes and we asked them what is it that little Belize is doing that other countries aren’t.

Dr. Michael Pitts, Director, Health Services
“Like the rest of the public, we are saying but wait if everybody else around us have, how come Belize does not? The truth is that what we do is we double our efforts to look through the system to make sure that we really don’t have. There are some markers, proxy markers and it’s technical but we do background check on regular flu-like illnesses and even for that we haven’t seen any spike in Belize at this time. The usual time that we have spike in flu-like illnesses is around September, October so we are watching closely. We call it the endemic channel. So we are looking at those and we don’t have spikes and in terms of the surveillance that we have at the different clinics, we’re not getting any report of any—the closest we had was the ship that came into Port on Thursday last week. We aggressively dealt with that in the way that we are trained to do.”

Dr. Peter Allen, C.E.O., Ministry of Health
“What we do look at quite closely is our epidemiology department and the B.H.I.S. informs our surveillance and so we’re confident that what we’re telling the public is in fact the truth.”

While lady luck has spared the Jewel so far, the public is urged to continue practicing precautionary measures.