Friday, July 13, 2007 Wenceslao: Worries in a ‘dengue season’ By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
TWO kids of my wife’s cousin in Inayawan were downed by dengue this week; one is back to his old ways while the other is still confined at the Cebu Doctors Hospital. Welcome to the dengue season, the description of Department of Health 7 officials to the wave of affliction now sweeping the province. Minglanilla’s cases were the eye-opener.
There was a dengue outbreak in that town, with Vel Pal Village Phase 1, where my colleague Oscar Pineda lives, among the areas that worried health officials. The other towns and some component cities soon followed. And like in the previous years, the threat won’t go away as long as rains fall and mosquitoes find stagnant water to breed in.
My neighbor just cut the branches of a tree that provides shade to his yard.
Mosquitoes stay there, he said. I don’t know about that, but as a precaution I bought a mosquito repellant in the drug store. I rub that lotion on my five-year old son Edison Khan’s skin before he goes to school. Like what my neighbor said, maayo nga maniguro.
Last week, I checked our surrounding and found empty bottles filled with rain water. Saw nothing unusual in the liquid but poured these out nevertheless. This is a tricky process because almost every day the rain falls. We don’t also have control of the hillsides outside, now thick with bushes. And are other people doing what we are doing?
I worry because the enemies are mosquitoes, or one type of these blood suckers. They are numerous and persistent. I remember lying in a hammock one night in a bushy area in Bohol. I was helpless in the face of the mosquitoes’ suck-and-fly tactics. I placed my head inside a net bag and, with my jacket, pants and socks, looked like an astronaut.
Our unfinished house can’t be fully sealed. The structure doesn’t have a ceiling so that even with the window screens mosquitoes still lurk in every shadowy area inside. There I wage an on-and-off war against them. I squash them between my palms when I see them flying, timing my action to be effective. We drive them away with electric fans.
In the end, though, you resign yourself to fate, or pray to God the scourge of dengue won’t knock at your door. Precautionary measures can only do so much. Dengue virus carriers are small, almost invisible and you don’t know where they will strike next. You deny them their breeding places, fend them off, and after that hope for the best.
MINGLANILLA WOES. Got a text message from a Minglanilla resident asking me to visit, on a Sunday, the town’s poblacion, especially the area near the market, to see for myself the situation there.
“Way pulis sayo sa buntag nga maggiya sa trapik,” the texter said, “labi na kun mogawas ang mga tawo gikan sa simbahan. Dugay sad makuha ang basura, naa ra ba sa eskina, kita kayo. Ang trak sa basura usahay dugay mokuha sa basura, baho pa kayo.”
I don’t know about the presence, or the lack of it, of policemen in the Minglanilla market area, but I agree that traffic gets problematic in the stretch of the national highway at the town center usually after masses. In this case, I have to trust the observation of the text message sender and call on the Minglanilla police chief to do something about it.
