SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

Se­nior In­ves­tiga­tive Re­porter

shal­iza.has­sanali@guardian.co.tt

The In­sect Vec­tor Con­trol Di­vi­sion (IVCD) which is re­spon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing cit­i­zens from vec­tor-borne dis­eases lacks equip­ment, man­pow­er and ve­hi­cles to erad­i­cate in­fes­ta­tion of mos­qui­toes in ar­eas span­ning from Ca­roni to far-flung Ce­dros. That’s the claim made by the heads of four re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions who have been work­ing and sup­ply­ing equip­ment to the IVCD as dengue cas­es surge to alarm­ing lev­els.

One of the IVCD’s func­tions is to mon­i­tor and con­trol in­sects and or­gan­ism vec­tors through de­tec­tion and sur­veil­lance ac­tiv­i­ties to pre­vent out­breaks of dis­eases. How­ev­er, Ch­agua­nas Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion May­or Faaiq Mo­hammed, chair­man of the Cou­va/Tabaquite/Tal­paro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion, Siparia May­or Dood­nath Mayrhoo and Pe­nal/Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion chair­man Gow­tam Ma­haraj said the IVCD is un­able to ful­fil its re­spon­si­bil­i­ties.

These cor­po­ra­tions have been loan­ing the IVCD spray­ing ma­chines and work­ing with the unit to fight mos­qui­to in­fes­ta­tions.

Mayrhoo ex­pressed con­cern that with sev­er­al con­firmed dengue cas­es in Siparia’s nine elec­toral dis­tricts, the IVCD in the re­gion “is flat down be­cause they have no trans­port. They have not em­barked on any spray­ing up to yes­ter­day ... that in­for­ma­tion came to us.”

Mayrhoo said the cor­po­ra­tion of­fered to re­pair one of the IVCD’s ve­hi­cles to make it road­wor­thy.

“But they did not get back to us on that,” he said

Mayrhoo said for the past three weeks, re­quests for spray­ing had been com­ing from every elec­toral dis­trict. “As we speak now, every area is crit­i­cal be­cause there is a mos­qui­to in­va­sion through­out the re­gion. Every­body is com­plain­ing,” he said.

The Siparia Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion has done in­sec­ti­cide spray­ing in San Fran­cique, Ad­vo­cat, La Brea, Rousil­lac, Ota­heite and Ce­dros where the con­firmed cas­es were re­port­ed.

“Fyz­abad had to be done in its en­tire­ty be­cause just three weeks ago a 16-year-old child from that dis­trict passed away with dengue,” Mayrhoo said

Three weeks ago, the cor­po­ra­tion had “about 30-some­thing re­port­ed cas­es and about eight con­firmed cas­es,” he said but based on a re­cent count, con­firmed cas­es have in­creased.

The cor­po­ra­tion serves more than 80,000 peo­ple.

Mayrhoo said the Cor­po­ra­tion’s pub­lic health de­part­ment has been tak­ing up the slack for the IVCD “which is not our re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. Spray­ing falls un­der the am­bit of the IVCD, which is an arm of the Min­istry of Health. The IVCD is the one with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for tak­ing care of a mos­qui­to in­va­sion in the area. We are do­ing as much as we can. We are try­ing to as­sist where they are falling short. But they have ac­tu­al­ly fall­en down on the job.”

The cor­po­ra­tion has two ULV (ul­tra-low vol­ume) ma­chines and two fog­gers. The ULV can be mount­ed on ve­hi­cles for wide­spread spray­ing in com­mu­ni­ties and the Cor­po­ra­tion has been spray­ing twice dai­ly around homes.

“We have a per­i­fo­cal team work­ing on the ground,” Mayrhoo said.

The first shift starts at 5 am and ends at 9 am. Spray­ing con­tin­ues from 5 pm to 10 pm.

He added, “And we in­tend to work over the next three week­ends as well. This would in­cur over­time for the work­ers in the Cor­po­ra­tion. It would run in­to thou­sands of dol­lars. We have two shifts work­ing per day to fight this prob­lem.”

At a coun­cil meet­ing this week, con­cerns were al­so raised about derelict and man­gled ve­hi­cles parked at po­lice sta­tions for months which have be­come breed­ing grounds for mos­qui­toes.

“We asked our of­fi­cers to go in­to sta­tions in our area and check those ve­hi­cles,” Mayrhoo said.

On Tues­day, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh warned that pub­lic health in­spec­tors have been au­tho­rised to fine cit­i­zens $3,500 if they fail to clean their prop­er­ties.

Cas­es on the rise

The Of­fice of the Coun­ty Med­ical Of­fi­cer of Health sends pub­lic health in­spec­tors to as­sist with the in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the dengue cas­es once IVCD com­pletes spray­ing ac­tiv­i­ties to kill adult mos­qui­toes. Deyals­ingh said this re­cent­ly when he com­ment­ed on the es­ca­lat­ing dengue cri­sis in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca.

Three weeks ago, the num­ber of con­firmed lab­o­ra­to­ry cas­es in T&T was 123.

There has been a 300 per cent in­crease in dengue cas­es through­out the Caribbean.

Ma­haraj said on­ly a few ar­eas were sprayed by the IVCD “be­cause they are sti­fled for man­pow­er and equip­ment. They are try­ing.”

He said af­ter some­one tests pos­i­tive for dengue “it takes a while” for the IVCD to vis­it their home to spray.

He said in New Grant, St Julien, Table­land, Williamsville, Hard Bar­gain, Princes Town and Bar­rack­pore, at least ten peo­ple were hos­pi­talised with dengue while some were treat­ed by pri­vate doc­tors at home.

“These were test­ed cas­es... con­firmed cas­es. I am sure that fig­ure crossed about 50. What we are see­ing now is very bad. Peo­ple are pan­ick­ing,” said Ma­haraj.

The cor­po­ra­tion has a pop­u­la­tion of more than 150,000.

Ma­haraj said the Cor­po­ra­tion used to pur­chase in­sec­ti­cides for two of its fog­gers while the IVCD pro­vid­ed its ex­per­tise for spray­ing to erad­i­cate mos­qui­toes.

“We are no longer get­ting that fund­ing. That pro­gramme stopped about five years ago,” he said, adding that the fog­gers are ly­ing idle at the Cor­po­ra­tion.

“If the min­istry could see it fit to fund us even a small amount of mon­ey where we could deal with this for at least three months,” he said.

Ma­haraj said burgess­es had been call­ing the Cor­po­ra­tion dai­ly ask­ing for their com­mu­ni­ties to be sprayed.

“This morn­ing I re­ceived about 20 calls on my cell­phone from burgess­es re­quest­ing spray­ing,” he said.

While Ma­haraj agreed with Deyals­ingh that some peo­ple need to clean their premis­es, he said some peo­ple with tidy sur­round­ings have test­ed pos­i­tive for dengue, “so the min­is­ter is play­ing smart with fool­ish­ness.”

He said spray­ing and fog­ging by the IVCD had worked in the past and can work again but one of their lim­i­ta­tions is “they have one ULV ma­chine” for spray­ing in the re­gion.

Ca­roni has the most com­plaints

Coun­ty Ca­roni has re­ceived the most com­plaints about dengue cas­es with more than 300 calls for spray­ing in its 15 elec­toral dis­tricts over three weeks.

“Our coun­cil­lors are swamped with calls every day. Be­fore the end of this week, we are plan­ning a joint ef­fort to go out in­to the com­mu­ni­ties to in­spect peo­ple’s prop­er­ties for breed­ing sources,” said chair­man Ryan Ram­per­sad.

He said the two ma­chines cur­rent­ly be­ing used by the Cor­po­ra­tion are not suf­fi­cient to ser­vice 178,000 burgess­es.

Ram­per­sad said the erad­i­ca­tion of mos­qui­toes falls sole­ly un­der the IVCD but his Cor­po­ra­tion has been help­ing, giv­en the grav­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion.

“We are in the process of pur­chas­ing six blow­ers that can do the ther­mal fog­ging,” he said.

The Cor­po­ra­tion al­so wants to pro­cure a ULV ma­chine.

In Ch­agua­nas, May­or Mo­hammed said there were close to 50 con­firmed dengue cas­es in Ed­in­burgh, Long­denville, Mon­trose, En­ter­prise North and South and Char­lieville, with the high­est con­cen­tra­tion of pos­i­tive cas­es re­port­ed in the Fe­lic­i­ty and Pierre Road ar­eas.

“This is caus­ing fear among the res­i­dents,” he said.

Ap­prox­i­mate­ly 120,000 peo­ple live in the bor­ough.

“We are try­ing to work with the IVCD to elim­i­nate the spread of the mos­qui­toes. We are prob­a­bly sec­ond on the list with dengue cas­es in the coun­try,” said Mo­hammed

The bor­ough has been loan­ing its ULV ma­chine to the IVCD to as­sist with spray­ing, which Mo­hammed said “would boost the ser­vices” there.

“We have no is­sues lend­ing IVCD our equip­ment. This is not a Ch­agua­nas prob­lem but a na­tion­wide health con­cern,” he said.

Ch­agua­nas has been us­ing two dy­na fog­ging ma­chines in ar­eas con­sid­ered to be mos­qui­to breed­ing grounds with per­son­nel from the bor­ough’s health unit car­ry­ing out these ex­er­cis­es.

Mo­hammed said the cor­po­ra­tion be­gan a spray­ing ex­er­cise us­ing its ULV ma­chine two years ago but “OS­HA came and shut it down” be­cause they were not fol­low­ing cer­tain guide­lines. The area where in­sec­ti­cide was stored and the use of PPE were the main is­sues of con­tention.

“There has been a lot of red tape to get that done, so what we are do­ing to by­pass that is to work with IVCD,” the may­or said.

Mo­hammed sug­gest­ed that the Health Min­istry think out­side the box and use aer­i­al spray­ing known as “crop dust­ing” to cov­er a larg­er land mass rather than spray­ing on the ground.

What­sApp mes­sages were sent to chair­men and may­ors of oth­er cor­po­ra­tions ask­ing if they had mos­qui­to in­fes­ta­tions in their ar­eas but they failed to re­spond.

In ad­di­tion, ques­tions were sent to the min­istry’s cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er Shemelle Paradice about the IVCD.

Deyals­ingh re­spond­ed by stat­ing that “spray­ing is not the so­lu­tion to dengue. Don’t fool the pub­lic in­to think­ing that spray­ing is the be-all and end-all.”

He said peo­ple need­ed to clean their sur­round­ings.