Experts fear public health crisis as Puerto Rico cleanup drags on
TOA BAJA, Puerto Rico — Three weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, killing at least 48 people, Jose Vargas Vidot surveyed street after street lined with mounds of soaking garbage mixed with mud, trees and sometimes dead animals.
You couldn’t make a better breeding ground for rats, roaches and all sorts of nasty diseases, the public health volunteer said. And every day the fetid piles stay there, the risk of an epidemic grows.
“We’re already building the next disaster,” he said.
Maria turned life for many of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million residents into a nightmarish scramble for food and water as overtaxed authorities struggle to deliver supplies, save lives and restore basic services. An estimated 80 percent of the island doesn’t have power and 40 percent have no running water.
Given the scale of the damage, it’s no surprise trash pickup isn’t a priority. But public health experts fear the rotting mounds are setting the stage for a new wave of problems.
Beyond the deaths directly attributed to the storm, officials say four other fatalities might have been caused by leptospirosis — a bacterial infection caused by rodent urine tainting the water from springs.
Six more people are being evaluated for the disease, which can lead to kidney damage, liver failure and meningitis. Health care poor
Vidot is a doctor and local senator who has spent more than two decades providing emergency medical services in places like Haiti, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Since Maria hit, his organization, Iniciativa Comunitaria, has been operating a free clinic in a school in Toa Baja.
The low-lying town, about 20 minutes from the capital, San Juan, was badly flooded during the storm. And now its narrow roads are piled with wet mattresses, mud-caked toys and warped wood furniture.
Vidot said the storm had “unmasked” weaknesses in the island’s health care system and caught the government flat-footed.
“There’s no strategy for public hygiene,” he said. “It’s not just about clearing roads but picking up debris.”
The mountains of garbage, he said, are “rats’ nests and full of dead animals. … And they’ll bring powerful contagious (diseases) when the rains return.”
In addition, puddles of muddy water are likely to become breeding grounds for mosquitoes and the illnesses they can carry — dengue, chikungunya and Zika. Acute water shortages
And while the island is waterlogged, more than 1 million people don’t have water from their taps.
That means many are living with the dirt and grime dragged in by the storm.
At the Iniciativa Comunitaria clinic, doctors reported an increase in cases of pink eye, skin rashes and diarrhea that often come with lack of cleanliness.
On a recent weekday, Alexandra Hernandez watched her husband pour a bag of lime on a dead cow that was tangled in a derelict tractor on the day of the storm and remained in their yard. The mayor’s office said it didn’t have the resources to remove the carcass and suggested Hernandez move for the safety of her 3-year-old child.
But she was staying put. “I have nowhere else to go,” she said.