The New Nation - Internet Edition

Sheikh Arif Bulbon

Mosquito continues to make life miserable in the city due to inadequate and irregular drives for what the Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) blamed inadequate manpower and logistic support to monitor the field-level activities.

People are frequently falling victim to mosquito bites especially of Culex at homes, offices, business centres, bus stops, train stations and launch terminals. Security guards and floating people are the easy victims of the stinging insects.

Residents in different areas including Gendaria, Jatrabari, Mirhajirbagh, Jurain, Rampura Mohammadpur, Khilgaon, Moghbazar, Mirpur, Kazipara, Tejgaon, Badda, Shahjahanpur and Uttara complained that they were facing mosquito menace.

People of different areas alleged that proliferation of mosquitoes continued due to irregular control drives.

Some people even claimed that any activity of the DCC in their areas was absent for the past couple of weeks.

"Inadequate logistic support hampers proper supervision of the field-level work and it is one of the main reasons for the failure in controlling mosquito menace in the city," said a DCC official.

The officials responsible for supervision and monitoring of the activities of field-level employees cannot do their duties properly due to lack of transports or transport allowance to cover the huge areas, he said.

Nasim-us-Seraj, Chief Entomologist of the DCC, said, "The officials, who are responsible for monitoring the activities, are assistant health officers, sanitary inspectors of all the 10 zones of the DCC and deputy health officer, chief entomologist, assistant director of mosquito control department at the headquarters."

The number of mosquito-control workers is not sufficient to cover such a huge area of the city, he said.

The DCC has 593 mosquito-control workers, including 184 of the Mosquito Control Department, responsible for larviciding and adulticiding in 90 wards of the DCC, and it has 368 fogger machines, 659 hand-sprays and 42 wheel-borrow machines for this purpose.

Seraj also attributed hanging latrines in slum areas, hidden places like drains and migratory mosquitoes to the failure of the DCC in arresting the menace.

Drains, ponds and canals in the city that cover huge low-lying areas had become ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes, he said.

There are also a lot of breeding grounds in different houses, which remain out of the drive, as the mosquito-control crew cannot enter these houses to perform their job.

The DCC had already provide a fund to every zone of the DCC to conduct a drive to clean every water-body in the city, which had started at the end of last year, said Seraj.

Larviciding that continues every day from 8:00am to 11:00am in all the wards will be effective if the water-bodies in the city cleaned properly, said another DCC official.