By Damion Mitchell, Staff Reporter
From left Dr. Beverly Wright, Medical Officer of Health, Michael Peart, MP and Mayor of Mandeville Desmond Harrison. - PHOTOS BY NORMAN GRINDLEY/Staff Photographer
MALNUTRITION WILL return in Manchester if a co-ordinated relief programme is not established swiftly to provide food for families at risk, according to Dr. Beverly Wright, Medical Officer of Health for the parish.
Addressing a Gleaner Editors' Forum at the Bethabara Primary and Junior High School in Newport, Manchester yesterday, Dr. Wright said the possibility of the recurrence of malnutrition was bolstered by the widespread hurricane devastation of the agricultural sector in the parish.
"I am not satisfied with the registration of these families," she said, noting that less than one per cent of Manchester's more than 240,000 citizens were now very susceptible to becoming malnourished. She also said it was unclear as to the measures that were being used to assess the extent to which families were in need of assistance.
Dr. Wright said before Hurricane Ivan, the Health Department was assisting person vulnerable to malnutrition though Food for the Poor, but this effort has been restricted with the majority of the organisation's supplies now being diverted to shelters.
She said the Ministry of Labour's 35 field officers who were deployed to conduct surveys in the affected communities of Manchester, were inadequate and suggested that registration centres operated by community leaders such as pastors and Justices of the Peace should be established in these areas to help expedite the data collection process.
Dr. Wright said because of the inefficiency in conducting assessments, Jamaica could lose available assistance from at least one international agency.
She said that on Tuesday, officials of the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) told her that an estimate of the impact of the hurricane at the parish or national level had still not been submitted despite the fact that the team will leave the island this Friday.
As a result, some of the supplies that were intended for Jamaica could be diverted to other countries such as Grenada and Haiti, which have been extensively damaged by Hurricane Ivan and Tropical Storm Jeanne, respectively. "We should have just done assessments and quickly submit them instead of walking from house to house," she said.
Michael Peart, the Member of Parliament for South Manchester, said he too was not impressed with the level of co-ordination among agencies in the parish that were involved in the relief endeavour. "There is not a central data-base and so we are going to have some holes in this thing," he told Desmond Harrison, the Mayor of Mandeville, who also has overall responsibility to supervise disaster relief activities in the parish.
In the meantime, Mayor Harrison said he was in 'total agreement' with the observations regarding the organisation of the relief activities. But he said attempts to meet with the agencies involved in the disaster relief have not been entirely successful, as all the participants are not always in attendance. The third meeting with representatives of the disaster relief agencies since the hurricane has been scheduled for next Tuesday, however, Dr. Wright said this was not good enough. "We should be have been having daily meetings," she said.
There were also reports at yesterday's Forum that a few cases of gastroenteritis have been reported in the Christian area of Manchester. Persons are therefore urged to treat water with bleach or by boiling before drinking.
