Letter: Cuba mobilizes against Zika virus

On March 4, the morning after I arrived in Havana, my landlady knocked sharply on my door and said, “Get ready quick, Matilde, the fumigators are here.” She was ready with a large sheet to cover my bed, and her son was quickly putting things away in the kitchen. Friday was our scheduled day for the weekly indoor spraying designed to reach every room in every dwelling in Havana and other cities around the island.

Cuban President Raúl Castro has mobilized 9,000 regular army troops and 200 police officials to supplement the many thousands of members of the “Ejército Juvenil del Trabajo” [Youth Army of Labor], young men carrying out their mandatory military service doing mosquito control.

Every room has to be closed tight for 45 minutes after spraying, while residents and their pets wait outside. The spray is hard on those with asthma and other respiratory diseases, although the newspapers say that in such cases a nurse accompanies the fumigators and will take the affected person to a clinic if necessary. But the only complaints I have heard have to do with fumigators not showing up or not doing their job.

On March 10, the Public Health Ministry announced the fourth confirmed case of Zika in Cuba and stressed the importance of anyone with a fever or other symptoms reporting right away to a doctor. Cuba’s policy is to hospitalize anyone with symptoms and treat them in a special facility with mosquito nets while waiting for results of the blood test for Zika. There have been no cases in Cuba of pregnant women infected with the virus.

The second phase of the anti-Zika war has just begun, in which the weekly spraying of homes and workplaces is being supplemented by the mobilization of medical students and public health workers to go house to house and community to community with an education and detection campaign.

I have been particularly struck by this all-out effort because I arrived in Cuba after a week in Puerto Rico, where I saw no evidence of any special efforts to confront the Zika crisis.

— Matilde Zimmermann
Havana, Cuba