Asuncion, National Radio.-There are no documented cases of chikungunya reinfection in the country. In many cases they correspond to a continuation of the disease or other variables, informed the director of Sanitary Surveillance of the Ministry of Health, Guillermo Sequera.
He indicated that reinfections could exist, but this is not confirmed by studies. Most of the suspicions of “having the disease again” correspond to people who were not cured and the tests continue to be positive.
He also recalled that there are a large number of variables to control in order to talk about reinfections, added to the fact that re-infection with chikungunya is not part of the current scientific consensus about the disease.
Virus characterization
At a press conference this Friday, authorities and technicians from the Ministry of Health gave details about the work to characterize the current epidemic in its unusual severity.
The technical director of the Central Laboratory, Cynthia Vázquez, confirmed that no new strains or sublineages of the chikungunya virus have been registered, and the one currently circulating has been doing so since 2018.
The phenotype that is currently circulating corresponds to the so-called ECSA (for “East, Center, South Africa”) and there are no significant differences with the phenotypes sequenced in the last 10 years at the Central Laboratory of the Ministry of Health, he reported.
PAHO/WHO Cooperation
Given the unusual severity of the chikungunya epidemic, which has so far claimed 51 lives, technical cooperation has been received from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
After a first visit, about three weeks ago, the complications reported by the Ministry of Health were confirmed and the multilateral organization issued an alert for the region.
The cooperation continued with experts from the vector area who visited Senepa’s field work and experts will come next week to support the surveillance computer systems.
To this is added the visit of experts from the Center for Disease Prevention (CDC) of the United States to carry out analysis work with the Health Surveillance Directorate of the MSPBS, reported Sequera.
Source: IP news agency.