One would think that the word dengue should strike fear in­to the hearts of all of us, think again! We love to have some­one else to blame for our mis­for­tunes, but ac­tu­al­ly do lit­tle to help our­selves. I have been in the pest con­trol busi­ness for over 40 years and was A Fel­low of The Roy­al En­to­mo­log­i­cal So­ci­ety, so I should know a bit about mos­qui­toes. De­spite my ef­forts to ed­u­cate my friends & neigh­bours and the mil­lions spent each year by the Gov­ern­ment in try­ing to ed­u­cate the pub­lic about the dan­gers of dengue and how to take sim­ple mea­sures to deal with the breed­ing of the aedes ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­to in the home, Tri­nis be­lieve that they know it all and there is no need to fol­low sim­ple good prac­tice. Take for ex­am­ple my neigh­bours, I ad­vise them to re­move the pot-saucers from un­der their plants in the rainy sea­son, as the health in­spec­tors have re­peat­ed­ly found aedes ae­gyp­ti lar­vae in them.

They are how­ev­er re­luc­tant to do so and will tell you how they put bleach reg­u­lar­ly in the saucers and how the health in­spec­tors al­so car­ry out treat­ment when they vis­it, de­spite the fact that they can­not get in­to the yard be­cause of the bad dogs and the fa­vorite ex­cuse " all the bush next door that the Neigh­bours do not cut", I try my best to ex­plain that mos­qui­toes do not breed in "bush" and in the case of the aedes ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­to which trans­mits the dengue virus, they main­ly breed in clean stand­ing wa­ter as found in vas­es, pot saucers, dis­card­ed cans and bot­tles and more than of­ten in drums and buck­ets that are be­ing used to col­lect rain wa­ter. I of­ten ac­com­pa­ny the health in­spec­tors when they vis­it the area and fol­low up by send­ing out cir­cu­lar let­ters de­tail­ing our find­ings, along with a few choice ar­ti­cles from the dai­ly news­pa­pers. Just why the health dept does not have a sys­tem in place to fol­low up or even pros­e­cute cit­i­zens ( like WASA) com­plete­ly eludes me. The cost ben­e­fits by hav­ing such a sys­tem must be stag­ger­ing.

When one of my friends two daugh­ters came down with dengue in an up­scale area in North T'dad, I asked him if he had any wa­ter con­tain­ers on the premis­es that mos­qui­toes could pos­si­bly be breed­ing in. His non­cha­lant re­ply was that he sees them all the time in his dogs wa­ter bowl, but he changes the wa­ter quite reg­u­lar­ly so that could not be the prob­lem. When asked if he scrubbed the sides of the bowl to re­move the eggs that are laid above the wa­ter lev­el, he said that he didn't think of it, but did do so from time to time. What about the lar­vae that were thrown down the drain, they could now be breed­ing in a pool out­side the neigh­bors house. The point is, if there is lar­vae, there are mos­qui­toes. My sons Town­house in Diego Mar­tin was plagued with aedes ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­toes for many years and the breed­ing site was not dis­cov­ered un­til we were able to get on­to the roof, on­ly to find that the builders had not cleaned the ce­ment out of the gut­ter­ings dur­ing con­struc­tion and that rain wa­ter was col­lect­ing, cre­at­ing its own eco-sys­tem with grow­ing plants.

I of­ten won­der if the same ap­plies to the roof of the Twin Tow­ers and so many oth­er build­ings in down­town Port-of-Spain, that seem to sus­tain en­tire trees. On an­oth­er oc­ca­sion I tried to con­vince a neigh­bor in Diego Mar­tin that the top of their plas­tic wa­ter­tank was pushed in, col­lect­ing wa­ter and breed­ing mos­qui­toes. All they had to do was re­move the cov­er & push it out. In true Tri­ni style I was told about the bush next door and the riv­er be­hind the house. When the mos­qui­toes got re­al­ly un­bear­able I con­vinced their Gar­den­er to re­move the cov­er and do the nec­es­sary. This solved the prob­lem. Try­ing to get the au­thor­i­ties to take ac­tion, oth­er than throw­ing a few gran­ules of lar­vacide in­to the wa­ter from time to time, was like pulling teeth. So much for a con­cerned neigh­bour. Ed­u­ca­tion can be a slow process and strange­ly enough it's the old­er peo­ple who of­ten take longer to learn. Do you re­al­ly think that all the plas­tic bot­tles, sty­ro­tex cups and oth­er garbage that is left in our parks, rivers and beach­es is due to the youth? It is ev­i­dent that Tri­nis must feel to learn and the place that we re­al­ly feel it most is in our pock­ets.

Dou­glas Clarke

Sig­nal Hill, To­ba­go