KAILUA-KONA — Call it putting the boots to dengue. ADVERTISING KAILUA-KONA — Call it putting the boots to dengue. More than 30 volunteers, health workers and Civil Defense personnel spent Wednesday morning pounding pavement in Kailua Village, searching for standing
KAILUA-KONA — Call it putting the boots to dengue.
More than 30 volunteers, health workers and Civil Defense personnel spent Wednesday morning pounding pavement in Kailua Village, searching for standing water and educating entrepreneurs, residents and visitors on the dengue outbreak.
The effort wasn’t intended just to bring the island’s last high-risk area up to speed on ways to “Fight the Bite;” it was to lay the tracks for long-term awareness that tropical mosquito-borne diseases are on the rise and could create more problems in the future.
Boots will be on the ground again today as workers resume spreading the word.
Two days have passed with the dengue case total standing still at 256 since last fall. But the question isn’t when the current outbreak will end, but when it will happen again, said DOH health educator Jason Dela Cruz.
“If we fight the bite for dengue, we fight the bite for Zika, chikungunya and West Nile,” Dela Cruz said, manning a table with informational cards and fliers across from the farmer’s market in Kailua Village.
Michael Dorsey, a visitor from Boulder, Colorado, stopped to get information on which West Hawaii parks are closed and why. He and his girlfriend just finished a weeklong camping trip around the island, but didn’t notice many mosquitoes, he said.
“I have had dengue before in Brazil; it’s a big deal,” he said.
The pair had planned to travel to the coast of Colombia this year, but called the trip off.
“We travel a lot and we’re not easily scared away, but we decided not to go, out of fear of the unknowns around the Zika virus,” he said. “We decided to come here instead, even though we knew ahead of time there was dengue.”
Working in teams of two, CERT, the Hawaii Medical Reserve Corps, Civil Defense and the West Hawaii Community Health Center canvassed the village — not because they believe the dengue virus is there but as part of a push to raise awareness and address any potential mosquito breeding sites. A DOH Vector Control team was on hand to treat areas of standing that the volunteers identified.
DOH workers have been actively addressing dengue in the “Hamburger Hill,” area of Kailua-Kona and in the Kona Highlands area, confirmed Steven Okoji, DOH supervising sanitarian for West Hawaii. Vector Control has sprayed Hamburger Hill, located on Kalani Street, three times in the past two months in response to a dengue cluster, with one of the treatments occurring last week. Kona Highlands was also sprayed last week.
Peter Silva helped canvas the Kona Inn Shopping Village. A few businesses were worried about the mention of dengue in front of customers, but for the most part, “people are really happy we’re doing this,” said Silva, a DOH epidemiological specialist.
“There are still some people who haven’t heard much about it,” he said. “Hitting the ground has been important.”
If the phone at Dela Cruz’s office in Hilo is any indication, dengue awareness is up, and anxiety is down.
“In December, my phone was ringing off the hook,” he said. “It’s been reduced. We still are getting calls.”
State officials, in finally issuing an emergency declaration over dengue, have done so with an eye to being proactive in the face of possible future outbreaks, to bolster an over-taxed Vector Control staff and to help beef up resources that are now concentrated on the Big Island, leaving the rest of the state ill-prepared to address mosquito-borne outbreaks should they arise on other islands.
Gov. David Ige’s emergency declaration last week makes emergency funds available for the DOH should additional spending become necessary, but the department doesn’t have any unmet needs at the moment, said Deputy Health Director Keith Yamamoto. The department had already planned to spend $215,000 to hire eight more Vector Control workers, an entomologist for Hawaii Island and a public health communications coordinator.
The department has just hired the entomologist, Yamamoto said. The communications coordinator will be coming on board in March and the job descriptions for the eight Vector Control workers have been sent to the governor for approval, with hiring likely to begin next month, he said.
In meetings closed to the press, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard met with Big Island lawmakers on Wednesday to discuss the dengue outbreak and steps to prevent the spread of the Zika virus to Hawaii. Today, Gabbard was set to host a roundtable of experts on those same topics at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine on Oahu.
