+- Punaweb Forum (http://punaweb.org/forum)
+-- Forum: Punaweb Forums (http://punaweb.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=3)
+--- Forum: Punatalk (http://punaweb.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=10)
+--- Thread: Open letter to Gov regarding Dengue outbreak (/showthread.php?tid=16614)
Open letter to Gov regarding Dengue outbreak - Punatic007 - 11-17-2015
Just rec'd the following from a mailing list....
________________________________________________________________
This is written by my friend Luke: (you might consider writing something to the gov yourself….)
Consider this an open letter to our Hawaii governor Ige:
Please, sir, give your full attention to the dengue fever outbreak on the big island. Your department of health director has declared it is not her job to proactively reach out to the infected population with mobile testing and other public health measures to contain this outbreak. Perhaps there are no epidemiologists on her staff to make her aware of the exponential growth potential of this disease. Perhaps the concept of vector control hasn't really been understood yet to include infected people as well as infected mosquitoes.
Her advice is to have infected people travel to their doctor's office and risk contaminating new flocks of mosquitoes in the doctor's area, and thus spreading it to those neighborhoods. This is an appalling lack of understanding of the measures that need to be taken yesterday in order to contain this epidemic.
Perhaps neither she nor anyone else at her/your level has yet come to understand that risking this disease becoming endemic on the big island doesn't just destroy the big island economically, but that short of absolute ban on interisland travel, it will destroy the tourism industry (at the very least) statewide.
A few hundred deet treated mosquito tents ditributed to effectively isolate people in infected areas so the disease doesn't continue to spread would be one tiny, cheap, and effective part of a solution. But things like this, as well as the reassignment of teams on other islands to this critical need, and assignment of portable testing units will obviously not happen as long as the current director thinks her job ends with ads in the paper telling people to get rid of old tires, and press releases disavowing responsibility.
Governor Ige, you might want to insist she see her job in a bigger way before we all find ourselves in the position of saying to our children, "I'm sorry kids. Once there were such things as jobs here in Hawaii, but that all ended when the DOH director was unwilling to do hers.