Gastroenteritis cases rise at Kwakwani

There has been a reported increase in cases of gastroenteritis at Kwakwani, Region 10 (Upper Demerara-Berbice), Chairman of the Region’s Health Committee and a doctor attached to the Linden Hospital Complex (LHC), Dr Gregory Harris has indicated.
He was at the time responding to questions posed by Opposition Member of Parliament, Dr Vindhya Persaud, who lead the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Social Services, on a visit to the medical institution recently. Dr Persaud had sought to enquire if there were issues as it related to access to medication at entities in the Region. Dr Harris responded that as it related to the recent issue of the increase in gastrointestinal cases in the community, access to relevant drugs has been made possible through Regional Health Officer (RHO) Dr Pansy Armstrong. As a result, he noted that there were no issues with accessing medication to treat those patients. The Kwakwani and Upper Demerara Hospital (UDH) at Wismar, Linden are associate centres of the LHC. The LHC is also responsible for the distribution of drugs to the institutions.
“Most recently, we have an increase of gastro in Kwakwani and what we did, we wrote the RHO and she gave us access to drugs,” Dr Harris noted.
Last October, there had been an increase in the number of children treated for diarrhoea and vomiting at the LHC, although officials at the medical institution had indicated that the numbers were not alarming. The patients were from areas across the Linden community. Chairman of the Board of the medical institution, Mortimer Mingo had asserted, at the time, that the Hospital was equipped with the required drugs to treat such cases.