Health dept moves to rid Lucea of rats
LUCEA, Hanover — To help prevent rat infestation inside Lucea, the parish’s chief public health inspector, Derrick Storer, has called on the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) to enforce the regulations geared at ensuring people dispose of their waste properly.
In addition, Storer maintains, business operators in the town need to recognise that they also have a responsibility to improve the sanitary conditions and the collection system for their commercial garbage.
If they failed to carry out this responsibility, he said, the NSWMA would have little choice but to see to it the regulations are enforced.
“The business people will have to improve sanitation of their premises,” Storer said. “(They need to) improve on their garbage collection system, improve solid waste management and so the NSWMA will have to enforce regulation to prevent people from indiscriminately littering the township and clogging the drains.”
The health inspector was speaking against the background of the long-overdue rat eradication programme for the town that was recently undertaken by his department amidst pressure from the parish’s development committee and the chamber of commerce.
But while he acknowledged that the health department needed to do more if the problem of rat infestation is to be controlled, Storer said it was a task that needed the input of other interest groups. Letters were sent to a number of agencies and entrepreneurs in the town, soliciting monetary assistance for the Rodent Control Programme, he said, and the Jamaica National Building Society has donated $10,000.
“Rodent infestation is a grave problem to any township, as it shows that there is a fault in the health standard in Lucea,” he said. “And an effort (is being made) to clean up the township, not only to get rid of rodents but also to get rid of things that will sustain rodents — like garbage and insanitary drains.”
He added. “We will have an entire clean-up of the community, which will go a far way in getting rid of the rats. If they do not have anywhere to live or food to eat, certainly they cannot survive,”
Other areas of focus for the health authority, he said, include ensuring that individuals keep the environment clean through the house-to-house inspection programme, where attention is paid to solid waste management on private premises. The health department, he said, will also focus on food safety or food hygiene as well as health certification programmes.