Aircraft, Insects, and Disease

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 25

Aircraft, Insects, and Disease

This is the text of a talk on health broadcast recently from ZB, YA and Y7Z stations of the NZBS hv DR.

H. B.

TURBOTT

Deputy-Director

General of meaith

\V HEN engineers dammed the River Nile so that flood waters could be controlled, and more production and richness follow the irrigation ‘that became possible, they never dreamt of the untoward result they were to bring about. In Egypt there was a snail, and the water that was to bring wealth, brought that snail everywhere, too. This snail was the intermediate host of a disease in humans called schistosomiasis. The fellaheen didn’t bother with privies and used the irrigation waters, the canals and ponds, for disposal of body wastes, for drinking water and for their ablutions So the infection was constantly in the water, developing inside the snail, and ready to get back into humans when they came washing or bathing. In spite of irrigation and plenty of water, the fellaheen became poorer, because they were riddled with schistosomiasis and couldn’t do a decent day’s work. Had those engineers damming the Nile linked health with development, they would have started an educational campaign to teach the fellaheen the proper disposal of body wastes at the same time as. construction began. The World Health Organisation is now helping Egypt to recover the lost ground, and achieve more productivity and less poverty by teaching the fellaheen how to avoid schistosomiasis. Here are some more unexpected results: Madagascar had an anophelene mosquito. It was carried to Mauritius where, till then, malaria was unknown. Mauritius had 32,000 deaths in a resultant malaria epidemic, following the mosquito’s introduction. It’s a long way from West Africa to Brazil, but that type of mosquito was allowed to make the trip. Brazil soon had 300,000 cases, 16,000 deaths. Egypt was free from malaria. Those picturesque boats plied up and down the full range of the Nile Valley. The anopheles mosquito joined some of these boats in the Sudan. Nobody worried, for they weren't on the passenger list. Arriving in Egypt, and deciding to stay, they gave that country hundreds of thousands of cases of malaria, tens of thousands of deaths. It was disasters such as these that led to travellers having to abide by sanitary regulations, so that they themselves couldn’t carry diseases from one country to another, and ships transport rats, fleas, and plague, and so forth. Air travel changed the picture. The safety from the

slowness of surface transport vanished. We in New Zealand could now be suddenly confronted with cholera and smallpox. We could have mosquitoes brought in from malarious countries, It is possible they could establish themselves in the warmth of the Auckland province. We are not as safe as we were in the past. The World Health Organisation stepped in. After some years of negotiations the nations have, with a very few exceptions, accepted the International Sanitary Regulations made by World Health, and have given them legal backing in their countries. This is why, on long distance air travel, your aircraft is sprayed against mosquitoes and insects, either before landing, or immediately afterwards before disembarkation. People are constantly making a_ fuss about this, objecting to the smell, objecting to the delay. Insects may be in the cabin of the aircraft, or in the luggage hold, or on the clothes of passengers, or in flowers given to them. They are not harmed by high altitudes, or changes in air pressures or temperatures. They have to be killed before the ’plane’s passengers land in a new country, So passengers have, for a few minutes, to breathe air full of pyrethrin and DDT. That is what is usually in those small metal pressure cylinders, or aerosols, that the steward sprays about during flight, or the health inspector annoys folk with just after arrival. You may perhaps see this method disappear, if experimental work on _ incorporating insecticides is successful. The idea is to paint the interior of aircraft with certain new resinous varnishes containing a powerful insecticide. In the meantime, no more poking of faces at the rite of disinsectisation of aircraft! "What good can that do?" I’ve heard passengers say. It protects millions of people in other lands from pestilences such ‘as yellow fever and malaria. It keeps New Zealand free from new mosquito introductions, and also from some carriers of agricultural and stock diseases. No more grumbling, then, but be happy to see the aerosal in. action.