Peter Krupa

Dengue fever is not a nice disease. Newspapers in the Midwest are always trying to terrify people about West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne illness which kills approximately no one. Forget about that. Dengue is also a mosquito-borne disease, but it’s an actually scary one that kills all sorts of people.

The first time you get it, it sucks, but you will most likely survive. Most likely. The second time you get it, however, it turns ugly - the second time, it usually changes into dengue haemorrhagic fever, a condition with all sorts of nasty complications including liver and circulatory failure.

Worldwide, some 500,000 people are hospitalized with dengue annually, and without proper treatment, 20 percent of dengue victims die.

The absolute only way to combat dengue fever is prevention. This is why when I lived in Costa Rica, every time I went to a movie there was a cheery little 1950s-style public service announcement encouraging me to get rid of flower pots, tin cans, open garbage, and anything else that might hold stagnent water where mosquitoes could breed.

Once they’ve bred, it’s much too late.

All of the above is common knowledge, available for anyone who wants to look for it. Using a publicity campaign, neighborhood clean-ups, and other prevention strategies, Costa Rica has decreased drastically its instances of dengue. The best way to prevent dengue is not a secret: You have to prevent mosquitoes from breeding.

Which is why an AP story today seemed so wrong. The headline: Cuba intensifies campaign against dengue fever; number of victims unknown.

Cuban authorities have intensified their campaign against dengue fever, sending military planes to fumigate streets, buildings and rooftops in the capital and going door-to-door to spray against mosquitoes potentially carrying the disease.

They have remained silent, however, on the number of victims of the disease. Community watch groups are telling Cubans there is an epidemic and the number of people infected is growing.

I get really impatient when people get paid to know more than me, and don’t. How hard would it be to do 15 minutes of background research and put in a blurb about the way the rest of the world has learned to fight dengue? No one uses military planes - the only way to stop a dengue epidemic is through prevention.

And yet we have the AP blindly reporting the crap fed to them by the Cuban government. Maybe they have their reasons, maybe they’re making compromises so they can stay in the country, but if they have to compromise this much I don’t see the point of journalism.

The only way to stop dengue is to get rid of the trash, the stagnant water, the open sewage, the shit that’s found all over that poor, collapsing island. That takes a public information campaign, and everyone working together.

But communist governments have never been good at either - which is why they always opt for the military planes.