Remove standing water around your house and don’t let water remain.
During the past few weeks, Aruba has experienced a lot of standing water. As the community knows, standing water can be a blessing, but it also poses health risks when clean water is left standing.
Aedes aegypti, the white-legged mosquito, can transmit different diseases, such as Dengue, which can cause severe symptoms like back pain, headaches, body aches, and fever; this disease can even lead to death.
When rainwater or any other standing water is left, it becomes a place where mosquitoes can lay eggs and breed.
The more standing water around a house, the more nuisance the residents and nearby neighbors will experience.
The more houses with mosquito breeding sites in an area, the bigger the mosquito problem in a neighborhood, and the higher the chance of transmission of Dengue, Zika, or Chikungunya.
Staff from the Yellow Fever Mosquito Control Section (GKMB) of the Department of Public Health (DVG) visit houses daily in different districts, provide information to the community, and help educate residents to recognize potential breeding sites around their homes. In this way, each citizen can monitor their own property and help keep the number of mosquitoes around their house and in their neighborhood low.
GKMB also carries out visits to public areas to treat or remove standing water so it cannot become a mosquito breeding site.
The origin of the mosquito problem is the breeding site itself. The more breeding sites there are, the more mosquitoes there will be. That is why every citizen in the community has the responsibility to actively help remove breeding sites in and around their homes.
GKMB sprays only in the event of an outbreak of a mosquito-borne disease, because spraying kills only the flying mosquitoes.
If the community does not remove breeding sites around homes, the baby mosquitoes (larvae) in the standing water will continue their life cycle, and within a day the same problem will arise again.
Act today, remove standing water; remember that ONE SMALL ACTION CAN HAVE A BIG IMPACT!