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Published On: Mon, Apr 10th, 2017

Earplugs

Collective Preventive Services donated earplugs to the St. Maarten Carnival Development Foundation last week. It’s well-intended, no doubt about it, but it is also the world upside down.

We all know that Carnival celebrations come with deafening noise levels and we also know that those noise levels are damaging to people’s hearing.

So from a public health perspective it makes a lot of sense to limit those sound levels. Protecting people’s health is after all a task given to the government in article 21 of the constitution: “The government takes measures to promote public health.”

But the government does not do this. Smoking kills, but cigarettes are freely available in our country. Extreme sound levels damage the hearing, not only of children but also of adults and the elderly. Yet the government does not act against the nuisance; instead it offers a Band-Aid in the form of earplugs to citizens who are exposed to it.

It’s nice to have a constitution; it would be even nicer if the government and the parliament lived up to their promise to uphold it.