St. Barthélemy?  Not!

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St. Martin’s health authorities declared in a press conference on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 that the Dengue epidemic that occurred on the half of the island they share with Dutch St. Maarten is over.  Briefing the press were Préfet Délégué Dominqie Lacroix, Public Health Inspector Stéphane Barlerin and fourth vice-president Pierre Aliotti.

The epidemic, which struck in November 2007, resulted in 2,130 clinical infections through mid-April 2008.  22 persons (14 adults and 8 children) or one percent of all infections were hospitalised during that time.  9 of the adults who were admitted to hospital contracted a severe form of the disease, the St. Maarten Daily Herald reported.  Another adult has since been hospitalised – and remains so - with Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever (DHF).  The island of St. Barths does not have it nearly as bad as St. Martin, but still 500 infections is quite a number on a rock with a population of 8,450 (January 2007).

French St. Martin declared the Dengue epidemic under control based on the relatively low number of new infections recorded over the past eight weeks and a prolonged period of dryness.

The matter of how dry it has been in SM is an indictment of our people whose culpability it is in the persistence of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the carrier of Dengue Fever.  The fact is that when it rains, the open containers we mindlessly insist on having on our premises become inundated; and because we never bother to check them for mosquito larvae once per week as we should, we thereby create the breeding grounds that proliferate the mosquito and trigger outbreaks of Dengue.

The five month battle against the Dengue outbreak in French SM involved no less than 80 fogging runs to knock down the adults, the fumigation of all arriving and departing airplanes from the Grand Case airport, an anti-Dengue awareness campaign which was waged in the print and broadcast media, the dissemination of posters and flyers, the removal and disposal of derelict vehicles and no doubt the actions of concerned individuals who rightly took personal responsibility in searching for and ridding their premises of mosquito breeding grounds.

All four types of Dengue (DEN-1 through 1v) are in circulation in the Caribbean.  DEN-1 is the prevalent serotype in St. Martin and St. Barths.

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