The Silence in Two Places

 The Silence in Two Places

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Guyana disappears from PAHO’s public warning. Its own Ministry of Health has been just as quiet.

When the Pan American Health Organization issued its first regional Situation Report on the strengthening El Niño phenomenon this month, Guyana was nowhere in it. Not in the Caribbean drought list. Not among the eight countries or territories with formal emergency declarations. Not in the Andean or Amazonian sections that named Colombia, Peru, and Brazil in specific and sobering detail. Every regional outlet that picked up the wire summary — Kaieteur News, Breaking Belize News, Carib Pulse — repeated the same list, and Guyana was absent from all of them.

Table 1. Summary of key public health risks in the context of El Niño, 2026–2027

 It would be easy to read that as good news. It isn’t. It’s an omission — and pairing PAHO’s public silence with our own health authorities’ silence tells a more useful story than either one alone.

Guyana is in PAHO’s data. It just isn’t in PAHO’s headline.

The Situation Report is a press summary. The document underneath it;  PAHO’s June 2026 Public Health Situation Analysis, ninety-some pages of technical risk assessment — tells a different story, and Guyana is in it repeatedly.

It appears in the historical table of countries with documented dry-condition El Niño impacts, alongside Suriname, Venezuela, and northern Brazil. It appears by name in the subregional risk overview, which identifies “portions of Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, northern Brazil, and the Amazon basin” as high-risk areas for the drier, hotter conditions El Niño typically brings to northern South America. And it appears, more pointedly, in the malaria section: PAHO’s own researchers cite a “statistically significant relationship” between El Niño and malaria incidence specifically in “Colombia, Guyana, Peru, and Venezuela,” with droughts historically preceding epidemics in exactly this cluster of countries.

So the technical analysis has Guyana flagged, by name, for one of the diseases with the clearest documented climate linkage anywhere in the report. The public-facing press release — the version that made international news, the version most Guyanese would actually encounter — dropped it.

That is not a scandal. Press releases summarize; they can’t carry every country. But it does mean the accountability question was never really about PAHO’s institutional knowledge. PAHO knows. The question is what happens to that knowledge once it’s supposed to travel from a regional technical document into a national health response — and there, the silence changes character entirely.

Hydromet has been loud. The Ministry of Health has not.

To be fair to Guyana’s institutions: this is not a case of nobody speaking. The Hydrometeorological Service has been issuing advisories since May, warning of below-normal rainfall, up to 80 heatwave days, and short-term drought risk in Regions Eight and Nine. The Ministry of Agriculture ran a stakeholders’ preparedness forum on September 1st, bringing farmers, cattle rearers, and fisherfolk together with Hydromet and the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority to talk water conservation and climate-smart planning.

That is real, credible, public preparedness work — on the climate and agricultural side.

What’s missing is the equivalent public activation on the health side. PAHO’s own analysis names malaria as a very-high-risk disease for Guyana specifically under El Niño’s dry-condition pathway — the same pathway Hydromet is actively warning about. Guyana still carries a meaningful malaria burden concentrated in mining and hinterland regions, the same remote areas that will be hit first and hardest by the water scarcity Hydromet is forecasting. Yet nothing has surfaced from the Ministry of Health specifically invoking El Niño, activating a contingency plan, or briefing the public on disease surveillance in the way its climate counterparts have.

The comparison worth making isn’t to Brazil or Peru — countries with structurally different exposure. It’s to Kenya, a country of comparable income level and comparable seasonal vulnerability, whose Ministry of Health has, this El Niño cycle, publicly activated a named “Health Sector El Niño Contingency Plan,” issued advisories to all 47 counties, pre-positioned laboratory supplies and rapid diagnostic kits, and put a named official on record explaining exactly which diseases are being watched and why. Whatever the internal reality inside Guyana’s Ministry of Health — and there may well be preparation happening that has simply not been made public — the public record shows a gap where Kenya shows a plan.

Two silences, one pattern

This fits a shape readers of this outlet will recognize. It is not that nothing is happening — Hydromet’s advisories are genuine, technical, and reasonably frequent. It is that the health dimension of a documented health risk, flagged by the region’s own health authority, has not generated the same public accountability trail as the climate dimension has. Malaria surveillance data, contingency planning, and public risk communication from the Ministry of Health are precisely the kind of specifics that would either confirm preparedness or expose its absence — and right now, there is nothing on the public record to check against.

We are not asserting that Guyana’s health authorities are unprepared. We are asserting that the public has no way to know either way, and that a PAHO document naming this country, by name, for a specific and documented disease risk should have produced a public answer by now.

We have sought comment from the Ministry of Health on whether an El Niño-specific health contingency plan exists, and whether malaria surveillance in Regions One, Seven, Eight, and Nine has been adjusted in light of the current forecast. We will publish their response in full if and when it comes.

This is the latest installment in The 592 Guardian’s ongoing coverage of El Niño preparedness and accountability in Guyana.