The Cabildo of Lanzarote and the Canary Islands Foundation for the Control of Tropical Diseases have signed a collaboration agreement this Thursday, which will allow the island to have a surveillance protocol from September against the possible entry of disease-transmitting mosquitoes, through the airport or the port of Arrecife. The agreement has been signed by the Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Marciano Acuña, and the director of the foundation, Basilio Valladares.
Through the aforementioned agreement, which lasts for one year, the Cabildo will subsidize the application of the research project, a pioneer in Spain, carried out by the University Institute of Tropical Diseases and Public Health of the Canary Islands for the entomological surveillance of the aedes aegypti mosquito, which transmits dengue fever. This will allow detecting, through the installation of traps, both the possible presence of this mosquito on the island and other transmitters of other types of diseases.
Acuña has highlighted the "importance" that the application of this preventive protocol of insular interest has for an island "eminently touristy like Lanzarote", because it will allow controlling "quickly and effectively any type of threat". In addition, he recalled that in Madeira, for example, "although the presence of said mosquito was detected in 2004, no action was taken, which caused dengue outbreaks in 2012".
False news spread in Tenerife about dengue
The councilor has also alluded to "the false news" spread through social networks, in which it was stated that a dengue epidemic had been detected in Tenerife, and thanked Basilio Valladares for his presence to "give peace of mind to the population in the face of this false alarm".
In this sense, the director of the aforementioned foundation pointed out that it is biologically "impossible" for a cloud of mosquitoes to reach the Canary Islands from Africa, since "they only have the capacity to fly between 20 and 30 meters". "We are going to denounce whoever has committed this irresponsibility with bad intentions, which caused the collapse of 112 and the hospitals of Tenerife, because that is a danger for the population," he said.
Valladares explained that, through the preventive protocol, samples will be collected two or three times a month, which will allow analyzing risks and making predictive maps that will be sent to the Ministry of Health when requested, thus complying with the International Health Regulations. "Recently, diseases have been detected in countries where the transmitting mosquitoes had never been, and what we have to achieve is that in the Canary Islands we continue to be exempt from these diseases, eradicated in the Archipelago in the 40s of the last century," he recalled.
Both Acuña and Valladares thanked the General Directorate of Public Health of the Government of the Canary Islands for "having taken action on this matter", in collaboration with the Foundation, the Cabildos and the airline Binter, which finances the transfer of researchers between the Islands. The councilor pointed out that, although it is a competence of the Ministry of Health, the Cabildo wanted to participate in this project because its "obligation is to protect the population". "From now on we will have a level of protection against this type of disease that we did not have until now," Acuña defended.
For his part, Valladares stated that the Ministry of Health has requested the documentation of this pioneering protocol to send it to the rest of the Autonomous Communities. The Carlos III Health Institute of Madrid, attached to the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and considered the main public biomedical research organization in Spain, and the University of Zaragoza also participate in the research project in a coordinated manner.
