Comment: As an Aside

Comment: As an Aside

As much as the Dengue is driving you crazy, it is giving me a headache just trying to keep abreast of its spread in the Caribbean. From my blog reporting last year on the Dengue situation in the Bahamas especially, I grew more concerned than ever about the amount of fogging being done. You see, there is such a thing as “resistance.” Wanton fogging allows the Dengue mosquito to develop resistance to chemicals dispensed during fumigation. When that happens, you can fog all you want, it will be to no avail.

I wonder how much work is being done on the ground to empower our Caribbean people with information on how to eliminate the breeding places of the Aedes aegypti mosquito in and around our homes and places of work. The point I am making is that we must de-emphasize chemical control in favour of physical (destroying breeding places and barring mosquitoes from laying eggs) and biological control (using guppies, copepods, BTi). These are the only viable and sustainable ways  to control disease-carrying mosquitoes. Fogging without getting rid of the breeding places is of no use, much like counting sand.

…to antiguaobserver.com

Oh, the Dengue situation in the Bahamas was bad. Quoting the Woodshed Environment Collective blog, “With the rate of weekly infections not letting up, total cases were at 1,600 at mid-August [2011].” And at that time, up to 100 persons per week were known to seek medical attention fearing they had contracted the disease. 

Everyone in the Caribbean should add weekly self-inspections of private and business places to their regular cleaning schedules so that even if environmental sanitation is generally poor in their neighbourhood, with countless containers holding “clean” water in the open, the mosquito breeding cycle is bound to be disrupted.

The control of the Dengue mosquito is primarily the responsibility of the householder since the Aedes aegypti mosquito is peri-domestic by nature. In this regard, so long as Public Health agencies remain at the ‘forefront’ of intervention strategies and the people are sitting back waiting for help, the fight against Dengue Fever is essentially lost.