Viewpoint: The Focus

Posts

Showing posts from August, 2026

Sri Lanka's Dengue Outbreak and the Case for Genetic Vector Control

The Current Situation Sri Lanka is in the middle of its worst dengue outbreak in nearly a decade. As of the latest National Dengue Control Unit (NDCU) figures (Week 29, 2026): The surge is closely tied to the south-west monsoon: cases roughly doubled between May and June, and July has already outpaced June. This mirrors a broader global trend — the WHO reports dengue cases rising from around 500,000 globally in 2000 to 14.4 million by 2024 — but Sri Lanka's tropical climate, urban density, and monsoon-driven flooding make it especially exposed. Why Conventional Methods Fall Short Current measures — fogging/insecticide spraying, clearing stagnant water, legal action against premises with breeding sites, public awareness campaigns, and hospital surge capacity — are essentially reactive containment , not elimination: Insecticide spraying is labor-intensive, temporary, and drives resistance in mosquito populations over time. Source reduction (removing standing water) depends on susta...

Arwi: The Bridge Between Two Worlds

* Image Courtesy: BBC/Travel A language born of trade and faith, written in a script found nowhere else on earth There is a script that looks, at first glance, like Arabic. The letters curve and join the same way, run right to left the same way, carry the same dots and diacritics. But read it aloud to an Arabic speaker and they will understand almost nothing. Read it aloud to a Tamil speaker, and something remarkable happens — the words come alive. They hear their own mother tongue, dressed in a foreign script. This is Arwi — also called Arabu-Tamil — one of the world's most unusual and least-known writing traditions. For over a thousand years, it quietly carried the religious life, the poetry, and even the medicine of Tamil-speaking Muslim communities of Sri Lanka and South India. Today, it survives mostly in old trunks, forgotten wells, mosque lofts, and the memories of a shrinking number of scholars and reciters. This piece of article is an attempt to introduce Arwi to a gene...