Since late last year, there have been warn­ings about an ex­po­nen­tial rise in dengue cas­es across this re­gion.

In No­vem­ber, the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) not­ed a con­tin­ued in­crease in sus­pect­ed and con­firmed cas­es and warned that “out­breaks of dengue and oth­er mos­qui­to-borne dis­eases like Zi­ka and chikun­gun­ya pose a sig­nif­i­cant threat to health, tourism, as well as so­cial and eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.”

That alone should have been suf­fi­cient warn­ing to T&T’s pub­lic health sec­tor and re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions, as well as or­di­nary cit­i­zens, to start ramp­ing up pre­ven­ta­tive ef­forts.

But just in case that wasn’t enough of an alert, there was a more ur­gent wake-up call from the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) with a re­lease of da­ta show­ing that as of April 30, more than 7.6 mil­lion dengue cas­es have been re­port­ed, in­clud­ing 3.4 mil­lion con­firmed cas­es, more than 16,000 se­vere cas­es, and more than 3,000 deaths.

Par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion should have been paid to the fact that since Jan­u­ary, ac­cord­ing to the WHO, “the largest pro­por­tion of the glob­al bur­den” has been in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean and there is con­cern about the ex­plo­sion of cas­es cen­tred in this re­gion.

Dengue, like re­cent ex­treme weath­er events, is the re­sult of hu­man-dri­ven cli­mate change. Ris­ing tem­per­a­tures and sea lev­els are cre­at­ing ide­al con­di­tions for mos­qui­toes to thrive, in­creas­ing the risk of dis­eases spread by those in­sects.

In T&T, out­breaks have been known to oc­cur every three to five years and in keep­ing with that trend, cas­es de­clined be­tween 2016 and 2018 but be­gan an uptick be­fore the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. The in­ci­dence rate of dengue cas­es in this coun­try has fluc­tu­at­ed be­tween 1.43 and 131.94 cas­es per 100,000 peo­ple.

Dur­ing the COVID-19 lock­downs, re­strict­ed move­ments meant that few­er peo­ple were get­ting bit­ten but it al­so meant that few­er peo­ple had a chance to de­vel­op im­mu­ni­ty.

How­ev­er, with the end of the acute phase of the pan­dem­ic and much clos­er and more fre­quent pub­lic in­ter­ac­tions, there has been less fo­cus on the mos­qui­to erad­i­ca­tion ef­forts that should be ramped up at this time of the year.

That should change now that the coun­try has record­ed its first dengue death in five years be­cause even one fa­tal­i­ty from this pre­ventable dis­ease is too many.

De­tails are be­ing kept un­der close wraps to pro­tect the pri­va­cy of the fam­i­ly in south Trinidad that lost a loved one to the mos­qui­to-borne dis­ease on Labour Day. That is the right thing to do.

It is more im­por­tant to fo­cus on pre­ven­ta­tive ac­tion, such as clear­ing drains and wa­ter­ways and re­mov­ing the piles of garbage dumped along road­ways and in open spaces.

It is one thing to sound an alarm about a dengue out­break and the con­cen­tra­tion of con­firmed cas­es in the Pe­nal/Debe re­gion, but the greater pri­or­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly for the var­i­ous lo­cal au­thor­i­ties, should be on pre­ven­tion pro­grammes.

So while there has been the usu­al clam­our for the In­sect Vec­tor Con­trol Di­vi­sion to do spray­ing in af­fect­ed ar­eas, it is al­so im­por­tant to launch health ed­u­ca­tion in­ter­ven­tions and en­cour­age sig­nif­i­cant be­hav­iour change in our pop­u­la­tion.

Putting more em­pha­sis on the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of every cit­i­zen to erad­i­cate places where mos­qui­toes thrive, such as pud­dles, wa­ter tanks, con­tain­ers and old tyres, will make a big dif­fer­ence in pre­vent­ing the spread of dengue.

Let’s aim for that all-of-so­ci­ety ap­proach.