It is flu season. Again.
Sahara dust, which up until 20 years ago was unknown, is so thick that from the Hololo Mountain Road in St Ann’s you cannot see the shoreline today. Times have changed, the environment has changed.
In years past, Trinis came up with names for the flus that went around two or three times every year. There was the lockjoint because it just never seemed to finish. There was the bird flu that just flew in and out and the swine flu that left you snorting like a pig. Everybody got one or another – sniffed, coughed, hacked, went to bed for a couple of days, complained and got over it. The WHO never said a word and the Ministry of Health didn’t get into it. Mothers and grandmothers that believed in wonder of the world, black sage tea and zebapique dosed you down for what needed to be dosed. I remember shining bush tea. They worked or they didn’t but you did what you were told. I drank hibiscus leaf tea for chickungunya, rubbing Vicks on my chest, on the soles of my feet and under my nose at bedtime. After a few days, I always got better.
But it was a world-wide phenomenon. In Europe it hit the headlines because of the way an Italian deputy public prosecutor felt about the reputation his country’s public service had for poor service to the public, for bureaucratic torpor and absenteeism due to the "flu", starting with the post office. That was before the internet had taken over, and Italy's postal service had a reputation as being among the world’s slowest. In TT, it may have taken two years for a packet of documents to be mailed from one judicial office to another, so that a prosecution for murder could not be processed: something to do with the wrong copying machine being used but murders are hardly ever brought to trial, or convicted anyway, so no one in charge of anything noticed, for an entire decade, we were told.
That, however was peanuts compared to Italy’s public service where four million people subject to repeated flu epidemics were employed. This unhealthy medical atmosphere appeared to have improved miraculously when Luciano Infelesi, the deputy public prosecutor, who got fed up with the notion that the public payroll was treated like a lifelong annuity.
In Italy, public prosecutors have the power to investigate and indict. Back in 1980, Italy began to jail public servants, and some private employees for taking unauthorised leave from work. Among other things the campaign cured the “flu epidemics”.
Their police chief, Gianni Carnevale, found 90 doctors that had issued phony sick-leave certificates to public servants. One physician, the head of the gynaecology unit at Rome’s Palestrina hospital was arrested for signing in for hundreds of hours that he never worked. Of course, our doctors would never do that. His plumber was arrested. In exchange for installing a water heater in the physician’s home, he was given "sick certificates" worth 90 days leave. Of course that was not the same as the scams used here for quarantine certificates during the covid pandemic. People got le
