Dengue Hits

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. -Louis D. Brandeis

The news nowadays is full with news related to dengue fever. After the reporters are tired waiting for ‘extraordinary’ cases in Hospital Sungai Petani, they move a little south to Penang, checking up the dengue statistic. For years and years to come (as I may say so) the dengue epidemic would not subside as long as Malaysian continues the habit of ‘hangat-hangat tahi ayam’. We just can’t continue on something good for a long time. We need campaign to do actually move our butt to do something good. I remember when I was young there use to be a TV campaign to promote people understanding of dengue fever, telling how the Aedes mosquitoes actually looks like. I remembered then describing that the mosquitoes look like zebra…having black ad white stripes. Also promoting people to clean their water container as it might allows the Aedes to breed. That was ages ago…I was still learning how to tie my shoe lace.

After all these years the campaign came back with new punch and a killer song too! My sister and I would laugh listening to the song, have you guys listen to it?…try humming along!…Dengue is a serious thing and to have that lousy funny song to actually promote it is …well ... like asking Austin Power to campaign for Katrina fund without being serious at all… I think it started about last year but too sad nobody seems to care…can they be blame for not watching a hilarious campaign like that? Only when lives are taken away then people start to pointing fingers at everyone but themselves.

Yesterday newspaper reported that papaya leaves can help too reduce to dengue fever, as known to the ‘Orang Asli’ but today, one doctor deny the news by saying there is no such thing. How can you know there is such thing if you never try it? At least try to do a study on it first…who knows it might work!…research related to human is kind of embedded in my filed of study…can’t help the thinking.

There is another remedy told by one of the professor at Science Faculty in UM, drink a lot of watermelon juice, it is said to be better that drinking plain water alone when you have dengue fever. Perhaps that too might work..