RESIDENTS in the Bangladesh capital continue to suffer due to mosquitoes as both of its City Corporations have apparently remained indifferent to controlling the vector even after the Directorate General of Health Services warned of a fresh outbreak of dengue this year.
Officials of the two city corporations said that relevant agencies in Dhaka were not co-operating with them in containing mosquitoes while city dwellers continued to dump domestic wastes in a haphazard manner.
According to Health Services statistics, at least 260 dengue patients were admitted to hospitals from January this year and 10 of them are still undergoing treatment at city hospitals. During the 24 hours till 8:00am Thursday, at least five new dengue cases were hospitalised even in this lean season for the fever, according to official statistics.
Jahangirnagar University Zoology Department’s Professor of Entomology Kabirul Bashar warned the authorities that the dengue situation would be more severe than in 2019, when the menace broke all previous records.
The main reasons for the mosquito menace are well known–we have a disproportionately large number of stagnant water bodies in the capital which provides an ideal breeding ground to these mosquitoes. This is due to the negligence of both the public authorities and the private citizens of the city.
However there are other reasons. The prime factor is that instead of the four-tier integrated management, which encompasses vector control, environmental management, biological control, chemical control and public involvement, the City Corporations are still depending on only chemical control that had miserably failed to control the insects earlier.
But even this approach would work if the two City Corporations didn’t buy substandard chemicals and then further diluted them to ensure that they were basically completely useless in their function to kill mosquitoes. So in addition to using only one method corruption in the procurement process for the mosquito killing agents also remains another reason why the pesky insects keep on attacking us.
