When Punks was a baby, several weeks old, I was renting an apartment in south Trinidad. The upstairs apartment was rented by a Trinidadian fellow who had married a nurse from India when he lived in England.
One day, I heard she was in hospital with malaria, this occasion being her second relapse.
Immediately, within hours, the Ministry of Health descended upon us in hordes. And I do mean hordes. Every single house within a 2 mile radius was checked, double checked and rechecked again. Poor Punks, being a baby in close vicinity had weekly blood tests, for several weeks. Adults were tested on a couple of occasions at least, and a strict quarantine placed on all of us. No going to work etc.
So much to my amazement I read in the Newsday that despite one confirmed case of malaria, the health service does not have the necessary medication.
If in 1998 all these precautions could have been taken, how come now a state of affairs exist where the medication is not now available? Does this mean that all that back then was a show, and no medication was available then too? Or that now they no longer take the same precautions and so the medication was allowed to slide as being unimportant or unnecessary?
Or maybe we are just stepping back to 2020.
