It was during the rainy weather in 2015 that the APNU-AFC Coalition came into administrative power. Its President, David Granger did not wait for the rain to stop, he went to work, his intention to proactively secure Georgetown and the nation from the lurking diseases that spring from stagnant waterways. We can all remember this current president in the genesis of his administration directing the clearing of clogged trenches and canal exists towards intercepting what was predicted by a previous Minister that Georgetown was heading for an epidemic. We endured the 2005 floods, not imported but manmade, that took over 20 lives through Leptospirosis and economically devastated thousands of homes; Leptospirosis is passed to humans through, in our case, stagnant waters especially where rats, pigs and dogs have urinated in and infected water that gets into our open wounds, or are bathed in by humans downstream where dead animals or urine is deposited or lodged upstream. Most of the animal carriers of these diseases are not affected by them, as we humans are, an extract on the science of environment I will feature in the closing of this column.

Colonial Guyana, B.G had a Leprosy Asylum, a Tuberculosis Hospital and possibly the largest Mental Asylum in the Caribbean, these were not museums, and all were functional institutions with inmates. Anyone over 50 can remember as a child, how many people we knew with Lymphatic Filariasis (Big Foot). This is a devastating infection of which there is no cure. Transmitted by a Mosquito called Culex quinquefasciatus; a night hunter that lays its eggs in filthy water, efforts have been ongoing by the Ministry of health to address this horrible infection. Neglect at the individual created human environment, how we handle rubbish, old tyres, simple unclogged gutters that contribute to stagnant pools are on us.

Yes, I know that for many of us who rent and share yard space this can be challenging, however, indifference to a culture of hygiene does not help us in the end. We must understand that the industrialised countries we look up to, do not readily invest monies as a priority into laboratories for diseases that are not common to their geographic hemispheres. The error also rests with not inducing the infections that are common to our environment into our popular culture, thus, creating narratives and character imagery that can sensitise and help to familiarise young people with the challenges of our tropical diseases. I’m talking edutainment here, it’s a frustrating but important area that I can’t discuss here. An example is Professor Howler in this section of this edition of the papers, the ‘Knowledge & Time page’.

The following extract will give a specific perspective on our history of mass disease and response. “On the whole, in the 1920s, despite their many shortcomings, the estates did infinitely more to protect the health of their Indian labourers than the colonial authorities did for the villagers. The miserly, often inadequate contribution of the former looks good against the puny efforts of the government, ‘a standing reproach to any community.’ The villagers had to pay a fee at Government hospitals; often, the sick had to travel long distances over impassable roads. And, as the surgeon General reported in 1922 and 1923, sanitation in the villages was backward the residents reduced to an aquatic existence during the heavy rains, because of a lack of drainage. The drinking water was often contaminated, the source being an open trench befouled in the most abominable way.

Toilets were primitive; the contents of these seeped into the drinking water ponds during the frequent floods. In the drought of 1926, man and beast competed for the brackish, slimy-green water in residual pools. On the Sugar Estates, my insert- [owned by the planters who managed the colony] the canals were deeper and subject to replenishment with creek and ‘back-dam water’ the drinking water though impure was better.

A contemporary observer remarked that a serious handicap to estate residents was the continual re-infection by adjacent villages, ‘where no sanitation exists at all.’ A malarial sluggishness characterised colonial attitudes to drainage and irrigation, sanitation and ‘the demon of Malaria’ which was accepted by Keatinge in 1922 as ‘the most serious evil in the colony. Source- Indian History Congress Vol. 74 2013 Author/s Mukesh Kumar, pp. 746-757- I must add, that the condition of the post-emancipation villages was a result of paying taxes to the very colony administration, that was to be used by the Planter management of the colony for drainage works in the villages, but was instead used by the colonial plantocracy to finance Indentureship, while doing everything to undermine the villages-see Themes of Afro Guyanese History. The Malaria scourge did envelope the entire coastlands and it would take Dr George Giglioli an Italian-Guyanese to from February 1945, beginning at Lusignan Sugar Estate to launch his field experiments that would result in freeing British Guiana of Malaria-see ‘Giglioli in Guyana 1922-1972 by Denis Williams. The concept of a ‘GREEN GUYANA’ as presented by President Granger is captured by this closing abridged extract -“where do viruses come from? The answer It turns out is simple, viruses come from a giant wellspring of diseases-also known as the environment, that we should be careful to disturb. Pathogens-viruses, bacteria, and a wide variety of other parasites-appear in nature as unpredictable, minimalist terrors equipped with little genetic material of their own but the ability to make up things as they go. A bird- flu virus can rest coolly in pigs and then flare up in humans, scrambling genes from all three species in ways impossible to fully anticipate with vaccines. The SARS virus bided its time among palm civets [a relative of the mongoose] and in horseshoe bats before killing humans in 2002. And possibly the most diminutive of all, the retrovirus HIV emerged from the blood of wild monkeys to become the most efficient destroyer of the human immune system. With strong enough poison and infinitely transmutable genes, a single pathogen could lay deadly siege to the rest of the world. Nature has an array of mechanisms that fend off pathogens or contain them in particular ecosystems that have defences built-in. Humans, however, are destroying ecosystems and changing that balance by taking those defences apart, making these warped ecologies ground zero for new and deadly infectious diseases, which emerge and spread at an ever-greater rate.   June 29, 2009 Newsweek magazine sec. Biodiversity-Medicine-‘Rise of the Bugs’ by Lily Huang. Management of ageless forest lands, specific ecosystems must triumph against the greed of pedestrian politicians; we stand on green ground and live in the precarious age where a ‘Green Economy’ must be enforced state policy. We have to also explore and acquire clarifications from WHO etc. on reports of wealthy businessmen like Bill Gates, if truly what now is on social media, of an advanced Nazi philosophy on social-human population engineering is true, directed at an unexpected Third world.