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Friday, July 11, 2025

Mayor takes measures to prevent dengue, virus

by

20140425

With the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency's ad­vi­so­ry that T&T should be on high alert for the dead­ly Chikun­gun­ya virus, San Fer­nan­do may­or Kaz­im Ho­sein has start­ed to re­move derelict ve­hi­cles from the city.Ac­com­pa­nied by mu­nic­i­pal po­lice and pub­lic health of­fi­cers, sev­er­al ve­hi­cles parked on the road­side were lift­ed on­to trucks and dis­posed at the San Fer­nan­do land­fill. Af­ter a sur­vey of sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ties, the cor­po­ra­tion iden­ti­fied and is­sued more than 55 no­tices for the re­moval of old and aban­doned ve­hi­cles.

Be­fore yes­ter­day's ex­er­cise, Ho­sein said 40 ve­hi­cles were re­moved by their own­ers. How­ev­er, 15 more were still parked on the road side ac­cu­mu­lat­ing wa­ter and grass, mak­ing it a haven for mos­qui­toes and ro­dents."When this new coun­cil took of­fice in No­vem­ber we em­barked on a con­sul­ta­tion process be­tween cit­i­zens, the coun­cil and the ad­min­is­tra­tion. We de­cid­ed on a few projects and one of the projects was the re­moval of derelict ve­hi­cles be­cause of the un­sight­ly and pub­lic health is­sues that goes with it.

"I must say this morn­ing, though, that a lot of cit­i­zens ad­hered to our call. Since No­vem­ber, there had been a pub­lic no­tice is all the me­dia, that we would start this ex­er­cise from Jan­u­ary 1. This is al­most the end of April and enough time was giv­en to own­ers of the ve­hi­cles," Ho­sein said.

With the threat of Chikun­gun­ya virus and dengue loom­ing, pub­lic health in­spec­tor Jameel Mo­hammed said it was one of a few pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sure the city was tak­ing. The Chikun­gun­ya virus is an in­sect borne virus, which is passed on to hu­mans by virus-car­ry­ing Aedes mos­qui­toes.

In terms of dengue pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures, chief health in­spec­tor John Ramkhelawan said the pub­lic health de­part­ment has been able to main­tain its mos­qui­to in­dex at a lev­el of five per cent, which he said is the thresh­old lev­el for the trans­mis­sion of the dengue virus."So we have re­mained in pret­ty good shape and we have just com­plet­ed a ULV (Ul­tra Low Vol­ume) spray­ing ex­er­cise city-wide and with the cur­rent dry sea­son, we have it un­der con­trol. We have had very few re­ports of dengue in the city for this year, so far.

"There are a cou­ple hot spots. Co­in­ci­den­tal­ly, they ap­pear to be com­ing, more out, of the af­flu­ent ar­eas where we have many locked hous­es be­cause our per­i­fo­cal op­er­a­tors can­not ac­cess these premis­es to do in­spec­tions. When we knock on the doors, they are all locked and those premis­es are the ones, in­vari­ably, where we will find mos­qui­toes breed­ing, es­pe­cial­ly the aedes ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­toes, which are the vec­tors of yel­low fever of yel­low fever and dengue," Ramkhelawan said.

While re­mov­ing a 1968 Toy­ota Mark II off Shah Street, Ho­sein said it was parked there for over one year and de­spite the is­suance of a no­tice, no one had claimed it. It was dis­cov­ered that the ve­hi­cle was a mere shell with the en­gine, trans­mis­sion and oth­er vi­tal com­po­nents miss­ing.One res­i­dent told the T&T Guardian the ve­hi­cle was parked there by an au­to-elec­tri­cian in the area. The elec­tri­cian was seen in his yard while the ve­hi­cle was be­ing re­moved.

Not all 15 ve­hi­cles marked for re­moval were tak­en yes­ter­day as Ho­sein ex­plained that some ve­hi­cle own­ers had re­quest­ed and were grant­ed more time. He said the city cor­po­ra­tion will bear the cost be­cause it was nec­es­sary for the pub­lic's health.


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