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When people’s homes are flooded, when farmers lose livestock and crops, when roads become impassable during the rainy season, it’s impossible not to feel sympathy.
The shell-shocked look is common as people try to assimilate what has happened, and what they have to do next. Apart from the horror of loss, the feeling of utter confusion and the trauma of trying to save your possessions from forces that you simply cannot contain—you really have no idea what the night will bring for your family.
Have you ever been there?
Every year, the stories are practically the same. News reporters take us right up to the damaged homes and pastures, interview councillors, politicians and victims, and we hear how long these situations have recurred over decades.
Water courses have been blocked by illegal structures (sometimes with “legal” authorisation), or drains are clogged with rubbish; we know the reasons.
And of course, someone is going to blame the government for all of it. The various municipal corporations are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of our national premises.
It is not a duty they uphold with any appreciable degree of conscientiousness. That is evident from the clusters of neglected lots, overgrown with bush and bottles.
People only have to see the signs of an abandoned property and it becomes a dumping ground. At one point on the corner of my street, one, then two, then three toilet bowls appeared, lined up like front-row seats at a game. This cavalier approach to what should be regular maintenance contributes to the overall disregard for environmental sanitation.
I often wonder if people do not have a sense of personal and civic responsibility. The drains do not get clogged by the government.
Have you ever seen the mountains of plastic bottles, Styrofoam containers and fast food boxes that the underground roadside drainage system vomits up when the cleaners make their rounds?
Everything lies there in squalid piles of black muck that are a reminder of what filthy people we are. Littering is such a way of life that people are probably not even conscious that they do it.
On more than one occasion I have seen men carefully tuck their empty beer bottles away on the side of the street—a little alcove on the pavement outside a business place. Bins are not far away, but it is too much trouble to use them. Not to mention the casual flinging of garbage through car windows.
Where do people think it ends up?
One of the things that really offends me is how often people drop their food and drink containers on the pavement outside my home. A very small handful of us on the street try to keep the sidewalk clean. But it’s futile.
It’s not like it’s a busy street, but you wouldn’t know that from its discarded refuse.
I’m a bit irate because when I woke up, there were streaks of blood on my pillow, and I know a mosquito had been feasting on me. With my history, I try to protect myself from the little beasts, and while I know they are probably as indestructible as cockroaches in the scheme of things, I do my utmost to make sure I provide no breeding grounds.
But it’s not enough when the neighbouring premises provide ample conditions for them to multiply. We’ve been told repeatedly that a bottle cap can be host to at least a hundred eggs. The multiplication rate is so boggling; it is tempting to believe that reducing the population is futile.
Not given to despair, I recalled that about seven years ago, Antonio Ramkissoon, a PhD student at the Life Sciences Department at The UWI, had been researching a possible treatment that could get rid of the mosquito eggs.
I was curious to know whether it had yielded anything. I got in touch with him.
To my delight, he was now a post-doctoral fellow in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, where he has been doing some ground-breaking work on antibiotics.
I asked him about the mosquito research and he said it had been promising, but it had not been pursued when he left.
I’d looked him up and saw that he has collaborated with other professors at the Life Sciences Department: Adesh Ramsubagh, Anderson Maxwell and Jayaraj Jayaraman on various projects.
I have not yet had a chance to follow up on the current status, but I am putting this out there in the hope that someone could resume the research that he has told me is worth further exploration.
The public has been demanding increased fogging of infested areas, and the Ministry of Health warned that the fogging does not affect the larvae, and that repeated fogging will increase the mosquito’s immunity to the spray.
Antonio’s work had involved the use of a local and natural source—when I’d heard of it then, it did not seem impractical to explore it as a viable mosquito eradication plan.
At this point, seven years down the road, we haven’t moved very far forward with this ongoing problem. We litter, we flood, we complain without acting; what do we have to lose by reopening this line of research?
If it yields results, it would be a contribution to reducing the global pestilence that is being wrought by the indomitable Aedes aegypti mosquito.
Surely, that is worth the investment?
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
