It is not the intensifying gang violence and three-murders-a-day alone that make TT such a frontier town, it is how inured we are to the deadly challenges we face.
The public outcry over two deaths, already, from dengue and the certainty of others to follow, is loud in its non-existence. I lost a friend in Colombia a few months ago from dengue - he was only in his thirties. People who have been unfortunate enough to have had dengue relate what a bone-crushing disease it is. A friend with a congenital heart condition had to abandon the tropics in case she had a third infection. Doctors warned she would die.
Citizens are being threatened with the possibility of a large fine ($3,500) if found to be harbouring on their property the larvae of the
Aedes egypti mosquito, which spreads dengue, chikungunya, Zika and yellow fever.
That is all well and good, because we like punishing people when they err, but what are the responsibilities of the authorities? The citizen can only do his/her best in what they control, not in neighbouring areas that are under local and central government jurisdiction and are breeding grounds for the lethal pest.
Running along the entire perimeter of one side of my home is a storm drain that is in such a bad state of repair that large pools of stagnant water deeply pockmark its surface all year long. Complaints, enquiries, requests have been ignored for years. Every few months the San Juan/Laventille Regional Corporation sends some workers at dawn to hack off the ever taller and stronger bushes that grow between the increasingly porous mortar of the walls that form the high sides of the drain. The vegetation is almost certainly weakening the structure. The corporation ignores that as well as the mosquito breeding grounds below.
Intermittently, at dawn, a vehicle of some sort drives along the street and blasts a strong-smelling mosquito-killer spray into the air. It claws at the throat and rouses us from sleep, but how far the spray travels to the back of our premises is dubious. Its efficacy at killing mosquito larvae is also dubious, because, excluding the fact that the more the substance is used, the greater the resistance mosquitoes develop to it, some experts argue that the spraying method settles the poison on surfaces and does not penetrate deep down through all the vegetation to where the larvae are living.
Spraying happened last week, in the middle of the day, unexpectedly settling poison on uncovered human and pet food and water. The public should be reassured about the ill-effects of inhaling and ingesting that poison.
Once a year, maybe, a couple of individuals from the health department come around to do an inspection of our premises. Once I saw them drop some small grey pellets into my bromeliads in the garden.
That is what is needed to do the job properly, apparently, but citizens are not allowed to have them and are not allowed even to know the name of the substance that has replaced them. How sensible is that?
It adds up to a typical case of poor but high
