3 million tyres, home to mosquitoes

Trinidad and Tobago has some 800,000 cars on the road — amounting to over three million tyres. With few tyre disposal or recycling options, several of those tyres get dumped either on the side of the road, or even stockpiled in a backyard. When it rains, these tyres collect water, and then become the perfect breeding ground for the aedes aegypti mosquito— the preferred host for the dengue, chikungunya and zika viruses.

Last year, according to the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), there were 1,051 of laboratory-confirmed cases of dengue in the Caribbean, of which six were in TT. But even though the Ministry of Health engages in robust public education and spraying exercises every year during the rainy season, when vector-borne diseases are at their peak, CARPHA’s executive director Dr James Hospedales predicts that climate change will have a very real impact on how these diseases spread.

“Over the last 20 to 30 years we have seen an increasing level in the frequency and severity of dengue. In the last three to four years, we saw the onset of chikungunya and zika. The conditions are fertile for spread. There are not too many signs of hope except to continue to educate the population,” Hospedales told Sunday Newsday at the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre’s International Conference on Climate Change for the Caribbean on Wednesday at the Hilton Trinidad Hotel, St Ann’s.

Without exception, he said, all the ministries of health and attendant agencies in the region have stepped up public education and vector control, especially in the face of vector-borne disease but he lamented that it might not make much of a difference because of “how high the environment is stacked against us.”

The region is also ripe for a dengue epidemic in the next one to two years, he said, because there hasn’t been an epidemic in about a decade and that’s how the trend usually plays out.

The vectors’ (host and transmitter of a disease) range is extending, he noted, and their habitat is changing to become more ubiquitous, compounded by warming and solid waste.

Vector-borne diseases aren’t the only public health threat to the region. This year, in one of the most active hurricane seasons on record—that is not yet over—the north-eastern Caribbean has been hit by two powerful category five hurricanes in a two-week period when Hurricanes Irma and Maria ravaged the Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico.

Aside from the obvious risk to life from injury and drowning from these storms, there is also the damage to public health infrastructure—during Irma the roof of the main hospital in Roseau, Dominica was blown off. Hospedales mentioned in his presentation that since it was built in 1979, the hospital in St Kitts has had its roof blown off 29 times.