Social dengue fever

I often hear some friends saying this dengue issue is really very serious because it affects parents and kids. I am a parent, a father of several young kids, but I am not as panicky or as alarmist as the others.  Why? Because I am part of the informed public. We are not stupid. We are not fools.

We are not going around town, telling the public that 70,000 kids are at risk of death because that is simply not true. Worse, these kinds of talk are being peddled by "responsible doctors" ---how responsible they are, you tell me. A non-doctor like me happens to know that mosquitoes carry the virus within them and transfer them when they suck the blood out of a victim. That virus goes to the bloodstream and interacts with the body's cells. Problems begin when a fight happens between the virus and our body's cells.

Being injected with this vaccine will not cause instantaneous death. It is not a lethal shot. However, just one bite of that mosquito bearing dengue virus will, if left untreated.

Why cause public panic? For some, I think, this is a diversion. We are diverting public attention from the monumental ills that beset our country today. While we scare the wits of parents just so they will readily agree on the introduction of a new dengue vaccine from another manufacturer (reportedly being peddled widely by those "experts" or "medical advocates" going around town, spreading the gospel of death instead of hope among the populace thru media channels), we forget that the economy is sliding down the path of perdition, reports of corruption are rising, there are reports of mass demoralisation among government employees, even from the uniformed services, killings of journalists and threats being heaped against some, China is reclaiming land at several islets being claimed by us, more Filipinos packing their bags and travelling abroad not just for work, but for migration, and rising incidences of social and health problems like HIV, drug addiction and others.

We have been afflicted by a severe social dengue fever for so long and the glimmer of hope flickers so slowly and so lately that the light is getting smaller and smaller every, single, day.

We need new social doctors to save us from this malady. The fact is, we are now at 2008 levels. All the gains we so reaped for the past seven years are now erased.

Credit that to our previous masters who are great motivators yet sneaky thieves. Credit that to a moribund political system that creates the very environment that allows these Piped Piper thieves to fool us into believing their gospel only to discover they are just lulling us to sleep and acceptance while they sneak in and rob us of our liberties and rights.

We are feverish with anger because we know we don't deserve such a society. We pay our taxes dutifully. We follow traffic rules every single day. We act as dutiful citizens. Yet, we are being barbarize by people who were not raised properly by their parents or probably taught an evil dogma that it is easy for them to lord it over while we agonise and left with nothing.

These people are the very mosquitoes that cause our social dengue fever. Our social disease is curable and preventable. We only need to clean house and rid ourselves of these pesky little dim wits and throw them out of our midsts.