Hartley Neita, ContributorI grew my young years in a mid-Clarendon district where sooner or later everyone, young and old alike, suffered from malaria.
The fever is a fire that burns every tissue in your body. Your skin burns red-hot like an iron heated in a pile of blazing coal. Your head throbs with a pulsing pain. It is unbelievable.
The cure then was a tablet called quinine. It was distributed free at police stations, post offices and at elementary schools throughout the island, but mainly in those areas where the malaria persisted year after year. Quinine was bitter. It never went down my throat easily. My mother crushed it and mixed it with condensed milk.
One method of cooling the fever was to slice the thick, juicy leaf of the toonah (cactus) and place it on our foreheads. Another was to wash patients liberally with white rum. We were also wrapped in pages of the Daily Gleaner to sweat out the fever. And God bless our mothers who lay in bed with us and hugged us tight to give us warmth and comfort. Yet every week, the bell tolled at the village church telling of the death of another neighbour.
Then World War 2 came. When it reached the Pacific theatre, quinine was no longer available in Jamaica as the priority was to provide it to the soldiers fighting in the jungles of east Asia and the islands in the nearby ocean.
Public education
There was, however, a public education programme being carried out in the island to prevent the spread of the disease. Much of this programme was carried out by a group of women in the Health Education Unit of the Ministry of Health and the Jamaica Social Welfare Commission. There was Carmen Stewart (the now Reverend Custos) and Ivy McGhie from the Education Unit, and Marjorie Kirlew of the commission, who translated their work into the language of literacy. And there were others whose faces I recall, but their names are lost from my memory.
With limited funds they produced handbills, brochures, folders and posters, which were distributed to schools, post offices, police stations, court houses, churches, and other popular public places. They worked with the Films Division of the Government Public Relations Office, whose film production pioneers, Martin Rennalls, Trevor Welsh, Dudley Harrison, Winston Rodney and Milton Weller, produced film documentaries and filmstrips telling the public what measures should be taken to stop the spread of the disease.
There were also radio documentaries, some produced by Leslie Murray-Ainsley for the Schools Broadcasting system and by Carey Robinson for the Government Broadcasting Service. I still remember his brilliant series 'Raymond the Sprayman'.
Simple things were told. Like cutting the bottom of empty condensed milk cans so that they would not collect water in which the mosquito could breed. Like burying bottles if they were not being recycled. Like throwing kerosene in nearby pools and puddles. And like cleaning drains and gullies. In addition, there was an army of public health inspectors, to whom Jamaica owes an enormous debt, who walked or rode bicycles from house to house, up hills and down valleys, checking on householders to ensure they were helping to fight and kill mosquitoes.
A tribute
When the international health organisations pronounced that Jamaica was free of malaria in 1961, this was a tribute to the work of these men and women who taught Jamaicans what to do in the quest for victory. This, unfortunately, was the beginning of a hands-off attitude to the issue.
< Two years later, Health Minister, Herbert Eldemire, announced that with Jamaica free of malaria, the training of public health officers would be discontinued. The result was the death of Raymond the Sprayman, and the end of the public education malaria eradication programmes.
For 40 years, governments in succession have not recognised that there are new generations of Jamaicans who were not told of the danger of the menace of malaria and what they should do to prevent it.
Let us hope that someone will now research the methods used by the Kirlews, McGhies and Stewarts of yesterday when the multiple media now available was not known to them, and begin to talk to Jamaica about what they should do to prevent this dreaded disease from burning a new generation with its fever.
Let's not make it a political issue. Everyone has been guilty.
