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Aug 22, 2011 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column
What do Caribbean people have in common? Not language. We have Dutch, English, French, Spanish and different variations of dialect. Callaloo in Trinidad is a soup; in Jamaica it is a breakfast dish – essentially fried spinach with the occasional sliver of salt fish thrown in. The Jamaican equivalent of the Trinidad callaloo is called “pepperpot”; this is different from the Guyanese “pepperpot” which is derived from the Amerindian practice of using a cassava-based preservative (cassareep) to keep a pot of frequently boiled and replenished food going to infinity.
However, cassava (a.k.a. manioc) is known as “Yuca” in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean but is different from “Yucca” an ornamental plant resembling aloes and “Yucky” to my children. “Carib” can be an Amerindian or a beer and “Arawak” is a chicken-processing company.
If not language, what do we have in common? Someone said we have KFC but the last time I was in Belize it had not reached there yet. It’s not cricket. We don’t have to go beyond our boundaries to realise that cricket is not played in the entire Caribbean. Soccer yes – every country now plays at some level.
Drugs – also yes, this is one of the downsides of tourism and the infinite demand that the United States generates. Crime – definitely yes since it is symbiotic with drugs.
Personally, I love markets – not supermarkets but the outdoor markets that we find throughout the region. Stabroek, Linstead and all the markets in the entire Caribbean tend to look the same, feel the same – the bustle, the energy, the talk and the produce. The language might be different but whatever the country it is one joyful Caribbean experience. But even markets don’t have the ubiquity.
Lurking under it all is the one common denominator that is the silent killer. Not hypertension (high blood pressure) although that is everywhere now as we exercise less and eat more unhealthy foods or what the medical people call “overnutrition”. But there are more mosquitoes around than hypertensive people and what we all have in common is Dengue, the disease spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Dengue is one of the most painful illnesses to have.
The Jamaican name for it, “break bone fever” is not an exaggeration. The combination of excruciating pain behind the eyes, and the feeling that every bone in your body “mash up”, is the best proof that you have dengue.
In the old days, the World Health Organization (WHO) actually talked about “eradicating” the A. aegypti mosquito and, in fact, thought that it had done so. Dengue re-emerged and all four serotypes started to show up in the Caribbean. The first time you get Dengue, it is from one of the four serotypes and it generally feels like the ‘flu except that you have pain behind your eyes and your body hurts.
While you never get the same serotype again, each time you get infected by one of the remaining three serotypes the disease gets progressively worse. When I got Dengue for the third time I was in hospital for two weeks and then I got a relapse that put me in for another two weeks.
It is common to dengue that when you feel you’re over the disease and you’re well enough to exert yourself, you usually get a relapse that is worse than the original condition. When I succumbed to the fourth serotype I joked about the irony – I was a resource person at a Regional Dengue Workshop in Barbados and contracted the disease there.
In fact, the general reaction from my friends was, “It is a good thing you did not go to a cancer workshop.” My own reaction is that if I was a horse they would have shot me.
The biggest mistake is to take aspirin or any aspirin-based pain killer since that can cause internal bleeding. If you live in an area with a lot of mosquitoes, stick to paracetamol or other non-aspirin pain relievers, especially for children. A doctor in Belize, despite diagnosing my daughter with dengue, put her on Ibuprofen and could have killed her.
One of the most pervasive myths about dengue is the belief that it is the Government’s responsibility. Dengue is everybody’s business. Because we are their breakfast and dinner (Aedes aegypti bite at dawn and dusk) these mosquitoes live in or around our homes. They love clean rather than dirty water and because people in almost every country in the region must store water for everyday use, every home harbours mosquitoes.
This ancient problem of water storage is now exacerbated by climate change. We no longer have one dry and one wet season per year in the region – we have several. We are experiencing periods of drought punctuated by periods of intense rainfall. Each of these brings out the mosquitoes and we have a new cycle of dengue.
Because there is no vaccine or any tablet you can take to prevent or cure dengue, the best thing to do is to take non-aspirin pain killers, drink lots of liquid and if you feel worse get to the doctor, the health centre or hospital.
Another myth is the belief that the nasty-smelling “fogging” spray actually helps to deal with dengue. It doesn’t and closing the doors and windows at the first whiff of the spray does not help either. The only way to manage the dengue problem is to keep your home and surroundings free of mosquito breeding sites.
Many years ago a survey conducted in a Trinidad community came up with a classic reaction. First, it showed that people know what to do to deal with the mosquitoes in their homes but that remains at the theoretical level and for many different reasons they don’t take the necessary steps to protect themselves and their families.
Secondly, everybody said they had done everything to stop mosquitoes breeding in their homes and blamed their neighbours and the government for the problem. The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago ended up with dengue earlier this week. Needless to say, she did not blame the Government.
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that the song you hear the mosquitoes singing in your ear is actually their version of the classic, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin…”
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