Havana Cuba. — This Monday, the digital portal 14ymedio published information about the EFE Agency about a new method of fighting that is tested in brother countries of our continent against the harmful species Aedes aegypti, vector of various diseases. The headline captures the essence of the news: Release of mosquitoes with drone, hope to combat dengue in America.
According to the information, “in addition to measures such as the elimination of mosquito breeding sites and fumigation, an unusual technique is now added: using drones to release communities of mosquitoes ‘vaccinated’ with a bacterium in areas with a high incidence of the disease.”
The “vaccination” is, of course, a manner of speaking. In reality, what is distributed in areas where the disease predominates are animals “carriers of a bacterium called wolbachia, which interrupts their ability to transmit diseases between people.” According to the communicators, the method has been used in Brazil, “where the bacterium has achieved significant reductions in the number of cases.”
The foregoing does not refer to the detail of the use of drones, a somewhat truculent note that Colombians now add to the spread of infested mosquitoes. The new means of struggle is added to the traditional ones that have been used since ancient times in the countries of Our America to face the pernicious denguewhich is advancing with impetus throughout all the tropical and subtropical areas of the continent.
While this is happening in our sister countries, what can we say about our beautiful Cubita? In the same information it is recalled that, “last Wednesday, the authorities reported the detection in the same week of 11,634 reactive cases of dengue.” This represents “3.8 times more than the positives reported in the first half of the year”!
Faced with this exponential increase in the incidence of evil, what can we Cubans expect from the Castro authorities? No drones, I think! Although… it’s true that with these communists one never knows what to expect! extensive national and international news coverage).
In the mass media, the Castroites and parrots seem not to have heard of the pernicious proliferation of dengue. Cubadebate, Granma, Rebel Youth, when addressing health issues, continue to focus the information on the diminished COVID-19. Like crazed parrots, they insist on the issue of the pandemic, and close their eyes to the other disease, which right now has acquired much greater relevance.
Infomed it has specialized its website for those who are interested in the subject. There we read: “Fumigation is not enough to eliminate the mosquito. The application of insecticides is a measure aimed at eliminating adult mosquitoes that can transmit these diseases. Its implementation must be evaluated by the health authorities, since it is only recommended in times of emergency, and must always be accompanied by the elimination of all containers that accumulate water in houses and public spaces.
I ask the brains of Infomed: And this multiplication by more than 90 (“3.8 times more” cases in just one week than in the entire previous semester! And this according to official figures, which are incomplete, since the majority of Cubans who sufferers of dengue do not bother going to a health center, where nothing will solve it!) does not represent one of those “emergency moments” that you consider essential to exist in order to use smoke to annihilate mosquitoes!
And in another order of things: Why now do they allege that this method of extermination is appropriate only exceptionally (“in times of emergency”), but for years they were fumigating systematically in all Cuban neighborhoods! And this, as a preventive measure, without there being a significant outbreak of any disease. If this was supposedly not correct, will they apologize to the population for having subjected it for years to the annoying smoke that, according to what they now say, was superfluous!
So, as a simple journalist and a layman in matters of health, I ask the specialists of Infomed: Doesn’t this whole shady affair have a much more pedestrian and vulgar explanation! Isn’t it simply that in this country plunged into disaster you can’t get even a little fuel to carry out the blessed fumigations!
If such were the case, then the invocations to the previous favorable opinion of the health authorities (to proceed only later with the fumigation) would be nothing more than a vulgar deception: vulgar ways with which to try to mask the prevailing misery, which is so much, that there are not even resources to allocate a little smoke to the extermination of the vector!
The highly publicized and propagandized Cuban public health must be very much in decline when its authorities are not even capable of pretending that they are trying to annihilate the vector that our illustrious compatriot Carlos Juan Finlay, in the middle of the 19th century, brilliantly pointed out as the transmitter of yellow fever, dengue and other diseases!
OPINION ARTICLE
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