The team of volunteers followed, with their “bazookas”—hand-carried, gasoline-powered foggers—to spray every home with insecticide as neighbors waited outside.

The weekly fumigation is part of a nationwide campaign that Cubans are waging, mobilized through their mass organizations and revolutionary government, to fight an outbreak of dengue fever.

The immediate goal is to decrease the infestation of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads the sometimes-deadly virus, and then to “thoroughly analyze, with a critical spirit” how to prevent further outbreaks, said Vice President Carlos Lage during an August 31 televised meeting.

Dengue causes fever, pain in joints and muscles, skin eruptions, and swollen lymphatic glands. Its hemorrhagic version can kill. Children and the elderly are at particular risk. According to the World Health Organization, dengue is a threat in more than 100 tropical and subtropical countries, where 40 percent of the world’s population resides, and in some cases it is endemic.

In 1981 thousands of Cubans were infected with the virus and 158 people died, most of them children. The government reported at the time that the disease was deliberately introduced from outside Cuba, blaming the U.S. government. Similar crises have not been reported since then, and Cuba collaborates with medical organizations around the world in researching the disease and searching for a vaccine.

The Ministry of Public Health has a year-round prevention program using full-time employees known popularly as “the mosquito people,” who inspect homes and public places for the insect, which lays its eggs in clean or dirty standing water in everything from water tanks to old tires, empty bottles, and hollow spots in trees. Others regularly involved in this “anti-vector” campaign include the Youth Army of Labor, made up of young people completing their military service, and junior high school students who make weekly rounds of their neighborhoods armed with flashlights.

This year the extremely hot summer and recent heavy rains of the hurricane season have helped create ideal conditions for the mosquito’s spread.

While there is no danger of an epidemic, “the ability to respond adequately in response to an outbreak will allow us to control it without it reaching epidemic proportions,” said Dr. José San Martín Martínez, national director of the health ministry’s Anti-Vector Monitoring and Combat Unit, the magazine Cuba Ahora reported.

The country’s Defense Council has coordinated with the legislature, known as People’s Power, as well as with the Communist Party, the unions, Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), Union of Young Communists (UJC), Cuban Women’s Federation, and other mass organizations to mobilize people to get rid of the mosquito and to immediately detect and treat cases of the virus.

Because the insect is most often in and around homes, education and elimination of breeding grounds are key to the campaign. Posters and flyers announcing “Offensive against the invader!” and explaining the steps for hygiene have been put up everywhere, and constant public announcements run on television and the radio.

Workers have volunteered through their unions to be freed up for two-week periods or more to be part of the inspection and fogging teams. In Havana, 145 men and women from all different industries have been organized into the first Detachment of the Anti-Vector Struggle for the Plaza neighborhood, one of many such “advance forces” to be organized in the coming weeks across the city.

The neighborhood CDRs are calling on residents to participate in clean-up efforts around their homes and yards to get rid of old tires, empty bottles, or other potential breeding grounds. Youth who work as revolutionary social workers, organized by the UJC, are making daily rounds in neighborhoods where cases have been reported, to check up on the elderly and people living alone. Special medical attention is being provided, including close observation under mosquito nets, when people have been bitten and show possible symptoms. Along with the house-to-house, school, and workplace fogging, health ministry trucks are spraying the pesticide, sometimes nightly in particularly infested neighborhoods, and crop-duster planes have also been used.

Workplaces can be fined if they do not take care of water leaks or other conditions that are conducive to the mosquito’s spread. The weekly Tribuna de La Habana published a list of workplaces fined after mosquito breeding grounds were found, and where “the administrative managers have not shown the attitude required for the anti-vector battle being waged by our people.”
 
 
Related articles:
Join effort to free the Cuban 5
In face of Washington’s restrictions on Cubans, U.S. academic conference to move to Montreal  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home