The head of the hospital service on the island of ReENion of the French Indian Ocean on Sunday, April 20, required medical reinforcements to deal with an epidemic of Chikungunya disease transmitted by mosquitoes. “We are really stretched to our limits,” Lionel Caleng told the RMC Radio Station. “The epidemiologists predicted that the epidemic peak would hit in mid -April, and here we are.”
His appeal came out a day before the French president Emmanuel Macron embarked on a five -day tour of the territories of the Indian Ocean, including a stop at meeting on Tuesday. Since the beginning of the year, Chikungunya has already killed six people on the island, and it is believed that around one in nine people in the population of almost 900,000 is affected.
Although France’s public health service said the epidemic seemed to be decreasing in early April, Caleng declared that “every day, for several weeks, we have been receiving between 30 and 40 patients with ‘Chik’ in our two emergency rooms.”
The four hospitals under their position have insufficient beds, with 581 people hospitalized with the disease since the beginning of 2025, including 46 newborns, while 540 medical employees have been out of work since it hired Chikuny. He said that so far his service had received three support doctors, but he was asking for six more.
The hospital service has discouraged about 300 previously scheduled operations and called licensed personnel to deal with the outbreak, Caleng said.
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