A buzzing menace

Monday, 20 February 2012 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Last week a team from the European Union (EU) arrived in Sri Lanka to study dengue. The EU has also agreed to funnel more than Euro 1 million during the next four years towards the minimisation of dengue.

Despite advancements in public awareness and treatment, the threat of dengue fever and resulting fatalities, especially among young children, remains considerably high.

In previous years a pattern could be observed in the Government blaming the public for negligence by providing the mosquitoes with breeding grounds in their homes, while the public in turn would criticise Government inaction.

The latest reports seem to be increasingly shifting the blame towards the Government, particularly in light of the failure of initiatives that were presented as major breakthroughs (such as the importation of a strain of bacteria from Cuba to contain the mosquitoes), but which nevertheless failed to materialise.

The responsibility may lie primarily with the Epidemiology Unit of the Ministry of Health to conceptualise a long-term strategy to tackle the disease, as opposed to regular knee-jerk reactions to surges in the number of cases.

The activity of special task forces appointed by the Health Ministry and even inter-institutional Presidential task forces, tend to react to the rising number of cases with an ‘all hands on deck’ approach that is abandoned as soon as the number of cases falls. As the figures below demonstrate, however, the hive of activity has been unsuccessful in producing results, as the intermittent reductions in the number of cases can be more substantially attributed to the natural cycle of the disease than to the short-term control methods.

Sri Lanka has not succeeded in moving beyond the commonly-used techniques of vector control, chemical control and environmental management, to more sophisticated methods such as biological control. Many other countries, including middle-income countries such as Brazil and Vietnam, currently use biological control methods such as Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) [29], which has succeeded in controlling the growth of many harmful insect species. There is also the method of introducing bacteria to the Aedes aegypti mosquito to prevent the transmission of dengue viruses to humans.

Whether or not these methods work is for the Sri Lankan authorities to find out and have a broader spectrum of study to deal with this menace without putting the lives of humans at risk. The fluctuation of public interest should not be mirrored by the authorities who are galvanised into action by the death of a child, but cannot keep the same level of focus on their work.

The latest ploy to have the Army inspect people’s homes is neither consistent nor sustainable and the real task of dengue fighting returns to the officials and the public. With January posting over 3,000 cases of dengue, it can only be hoped that this challenge is dealt with before another death occurs to awaken everyone’s conscience.