Centre should be more responsive to dengue outbreak

The country has been battling with public health problems like malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, maternal and child mortality and HIV/AIDS, but to a greater extent, these diseases have been eradicated and some are even reversed such as HIV/AIDS.  

New challenges to the public health in the last two decades are the malaria, SARS, avian-flu, swine-flu and outbreak of fevers such as dengue, influenza, flu, etc.  Dengue has particularly been a great challenge to the state. 

Official figures say it has taken 40 lives out of 12,000 cases reported in Tamil Nadu this year. In 1978, at the Alma-Ata Conference, ministers from 134 countries, in association with WHO and UNICEF, called for ‘Health for All by the Year 2000’ and selected Primary Health Care as the best tool to achieve it.  This remains as an unfulfilled dream.  

The central team visiting TN itself is a reason for concern, because the spread of the disease is seen in all the southern states.  Kerala has long been projected as a model for public health intervention in prevention, but it is battling to address the dengue issue.  

Why are the Southern States, which have a good human development indexes compared to other regions in India, caught up with the ‘dengue’ danger? Health is a state subject, but the Centre deals with the health, through its Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.  

Renowned medical institutions and research centres come under the Union Ministry. Normally, the funds allocated to health sector are inadequate and the states do not possess resources to address public health challenges, like the ‘dengue’.  

The reasons cited for the spread of dengue are:  people store water in drums and in other utensils and the mosquitoes breed in them; also, the lack of sanitation facilities.  It is the poor, below poverty line (BPL), inter-state migrants and refugees who are largely the targeted population of this disease. It is they who do not have access to good drinking water and sanitation.  

While middle and upper middle class go for private health care, it is largely the poor who go to the government-run hospitals, where facilities for admitting the patient is limited and poor maintenance force the patients to seek private health care, rather than public health care.  

The State has to be alert when there is an outbreak of ‘dengue’ and other related diseases. TN, in the past, has never witnessed so many people being treated for ‘dengue’ and losing the precious lives of more than 40.  In the past, the governments would act quickly and try to get as much help as possible from the Centre.  

Though health is a state subject but the research and well-known medical institutions come under the Centre.  Sometimes, the state was part of the ruling alliance at the Centre and other times it was not part of the alliance, but still, Chief Ministers like M Karunanidhi and J Jayalalithaa sought the help of the Centre at once when they felt that the problem may not be handled effectively by the state and with the limited resources of the state.   

It is a medical emergency and the state should act swiftly.  The statement of the central team that, “Death is 40…it is very minimal death,” is an irresponsible statement.  

Every life is precious and every life matters. Our country is a signatory to the International covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights (1966) which guarantees ‘the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health’ (Article 12). It is the duty of the state to create an environment for realising this right by every citizen.