NEW DELHI: Picture this. Fogging vans zig-zag their way through narrow bazaars and crowded mohallas, huge smoke clouds billowing out into the streets. Talk of fever and death doing the rounds. Reports of scores landing up at the country’s top medicare facility, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, as staple headlines. Dengue has hit India. A mosquito has exposed the chinks in medi care system. The Prime Minister’s house has been hit, and very badly. His son-in-law and two grand sons spent time in hospital. And doctor died of dengue. Down south, Chikunguniya has crippledd public life.

Total number of confirmed dengue cases have touched  above 3000. Deaths have crossed the 50 figure. India lived through scary times this week, and there is little hope in future. Fumigation is a lame reaction, a desperate, last-ditch attempt to showcase the local government’s efforts to protect the people even as hospital wards fill up with patients with symptoms of various deadly mosquito-borne diseases: Malaria, dengue, Japanese encephalitis, kala azar, filaria, chikungunya. Experts agree fumigation is ineffective against the Aedes—the carrier of dengue and chikungunya— as it knocks down a few adults at best, while a whole new generation breeds in less than a fortnight. With no vaccine, medicine or technique available so far to tackle these diseases, the only strategy is vector control.

The issue thus becomes a public health and sanitation issue rather than a medical one. And public health is the large gaping hole that makes this lastminute battle against the mosquito seem futile.  Here is the culprit: India’s National Vector-Borne Disease Programme focusses only on malaria. As a result, Indian researchers face twin challenges: One, even as efforts to combat malaria are stepped up, some strains of the disease begin developing resistance and two, the dengue-carrying aedes requires am different strategy than the malarial anopheles. Dengue is now endemic in more than 100 countries in Africa, the Americas, the eastern Mediterranean, the western Pacific and South-East Asia. The  shortcoming right now is that the government tends to get into the act after the first cases. Complete monitoring and early recognition is required before preventive measures can be taken.