Westmoreland Residents Urged To Keep Harmful Chemicals Out Of Children’s Reach

Medical Officer of Health for Westmoreland, Dr. Marcia Graham, is imploring residents of the parish to keep harmful chemicals out of the reach of children in order to prevent accidental poisoning.

“We are not comfortable with the number of accidental poisonings that we are seeing. Children are home and some of them are not getting adequate supervision. We had three cases this January compared to four for [January] last year and in both years, we had two each in February,” she said.

“The main culprits are liquid bleach, powdered bleach, rat poison and detergent, so we are asking persons to secure these items immediately after use and store them properly so that we do not endanger our children,” she urged.

Dr. Graham was addressing the monthly meeting of the Westmoreland Municipal Corporation at its offices in Savanna-la-Mar on March 11.

Turning to other matters, she encouraged residents to remain vigilant in destroying mosquito breeding sites, as there is a slight uptick of the Aedes index in the parish.

The Aedes index refers to the percentage of premises or homes in a limited, well-defined space, where actual breeding of Aedes aegypti is found and the total number of houses examined in that area.

“We really have noted that whereas the number of [dengue] notifications for this year is significantly lower than last year – six compared to 81, we are seeing that our Aedes index is inching up. It was 4.6 per cent a month ago and it’s inching up now in the region of 8.6 per cent,” Dr. Graham indicated.

“I am saying to us, let’s nip it in the bud. We want to keep it under five per cent, so please [do] weekly search and destroy of breeding sites and protect yourselves against mosquito bites if you already have adult [mosquitos] in the area,” she advised.

She said that the public health department continues its house-to-house sensitisation activities “to empower households to continue searching for mosquito breeding sites, and we continue our fogging activities but we need your support. We will have less need for fogging if we kill the baby mosquitos [by] destroying the breeding sites”.