Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says le­gal pro­ceed­ings have been con­sid­ered for 81 home­own­ers re­gard­ing the clean­ing up of their sur­round­ings.

Giv­ing an up­date on the dengue sit­u­a­tion in the Sen­ate on Tues­day fol­low­ing a ques­tion from Op­po­si­tion sen­a­tor Wade Mark, Deyal­saingh said tens of thou­sands of hous­es around T&T have been sprayed and "fogged" to pre­vent the spread of the dengue-car­ry­ing Aedes Ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­to and 1,324 no­tices have been is­sued to prop­er­ty own­ers/oc­cu­piers to clean up their sur­round­ings.

This was on Gov­ern­ment's ac­tion to com­bat the spread and deaths as­so­ci­at­ed with the dengue virus, giv­en re­ports of 2,004 lab­o­ra­to­ry-con­firmed cas­es of dengue fever and 19 deaths.

Deyals­ingh said, "Since Jan­u­ary 2024, the Min­istry of Health launched a com­pre­hen­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­e­gy, aimed at ed­u­cat­ing the pub­lic on source re­duc­tion strate­gies to com­bat the breed­ing of the Aedes Ae­gyp­ti mos­qui­to, the pri­ma­ry vec­tor re­spon­si­ble for dengue fever."

Deyals­ingh de­tailed com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­e­gy which in­clud­ed pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion ac­tiv­i­ties in­volv­ing events and me­dia cam­paigns.

Deyals­ingh al­so de­tailed the ma­jor com­po­nents of the dengue re­sponse. This in­cludes ed­u­cat­ing the pub­lic on the im­por­tance and ef­fec­tive meth­ods of re­duc­ing sources of vec­tor breed­ing and killing mos­qui­to lar­vae via the ap­pli­ca­tion of a sil­i­cone-based chem­i­cal (Aquatain MF).

The min­is­ter gave fig­ures for the num­ber of hous­es sprayed with var­i­ous so­lu­tions:

Ap­pli­ca­tion of resid­ual in­sec­ti­cide to the in­ter­nal walls of premis­es to kill adult mos­qui­toes which re­mains ef­fec­tive for ap­prox­i­mate­ly 90 days - 83,329 hous­es sprayed for fis­cal 2024.

Ther­mal (hot) Fog­ging around premis­es - 26,327 hous­es fogged for fis­cal 2024.

Ul­tra-Low Vol­ume space spray­ing (ULV) is con­duct­ed via a truck-mount­ed ma­chine to kill adult mos­qui­toes. The av­er­age num­ber of hous­es treat­ed per cy­cle is ap­prox­i­mate­ly 500 - for fis­cal 2024, 166,767 hous­es sprayed.

In the Gov­ern­ment's source re­duc­tion strat­e­gy where Pub­lic Health In­spec­tors are au­tho­rised to is­sue fines, to res­i­dents who fail to main­tain their prop­er­ties, Deyals­ingh added, as of Oc­to­ber 18, 2024, a to­tal of 1,324 Yel­low Fever no­tices have been is­sued to prop­er­ty own­ers/oc­cu­piers, di­rect­ing them to clean up their sur­round­ings.

"Of this, 81 prop­er­ty own­ers/oc­cu­piers have thus far been iden­ti­fied for the con­sid­er­a­tion/in­sti­tu­tion of le­gal pro­ceed­ings for non-com­pli­ance."

Deyals­ingh said the min­istry had been ad­vis­ing peo­ple the best way to deal with dengue is source re­duc­tion at the house­hold lev­el, "And it was un­for­tu­nate that four cor­po­ra­tions - one on Grande and three in south- kept point­ing the me­dia not to house­holds, but dirty drains which don't breed Aedes Ae­gyp­ti."

Deyals­ingh said there was no wide­spread "de­lap­i­da­tion" of the In­sect Vec­tor di­vi­sion, "Six­teen new pick ups were bought in 2024, new ther­mal fog­gers were bought." He called for the Op­po­si­tion and Gov­ern­ment to be aligned on mes­sag­ing on the is­sue or peo­ple would suf­fer amid con­fus­ing mes­sages.