[india-drug] Lessons from the measles tragedy in India

["Dr Gopal Dabade" <dabadedr@yahoo.com>]

Lessons from the measles tragedy in India
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Copied for fair use  
http://www.newindpress.com/newspages.asp?page=f&Title=First+Editorial&; 
  
Saturday April 26 2008 

  Tragedies involving children are gut-wrenching and our heart goes out to the parents and grandparents of the four infants who died on Wednesday in Tamil Nadu?s measles immunisation tragedy. To bring your smiling and trusting child to a health centre in the eager hope of immunising it from disease and to then see the child die is a nightmare beyond imagination.

The families will have to live with this one all their lives and we can only wish them the resolution to bear it well and without turning bitter. It would be a change for the better if, on top of the Rs 3 lakh solatium announced by the state government for each family, a practice is begun of arranging for mental counselling and related material help at the affected homes. Our systems of administration have yet to make a practice, let alone an effective one, of such measures to show that society cares even as it must be moving on. These need to begin doing so at some point. Unfortunately, in our beloved country, there is a continuing crop of human tragedy. The answer lies in understanding why it happened and to put in place, and keep checking, the means of prevention and redressal.

We all await the results of the ongoing inquiries into the tragedy; indeed, the matter is of some urgency, as all measles vaccination has been halted in the country till further notice. There is, however, one ready lesson apparent and that is to stop taking so lightly the measures for a fall-back if things should go wrong. Health department officials at the spot had, it appears, made patchy or no arrangements for expert help or for prompt referral; one is quoted as saying they never expected something like this to happen. And so, the babies struggled to breathe and died, even as no one knew what to do. The Chennai edition of this newspaper carried a report yesterday from Chennai city of a boy who had an adverse reaction to a triple antigen booster at one city hospital, and whose father had to rush him to another hospital and then to a third, where he died. Safety and danger- prevention consciousness is very poor in our society, uniformly; open or trailing wires, uneven surfaces, jutting edges, etc., are endemic in all buildings, for instance. Let?s do a short drill before any event we organise of what could go wrong and to arrange a back-up.
   
Dr Gopal Dabade,
57, Tejaswinagar,
Dharwad 580 002
Tel 0836-2461722
Cell (0)9448862270
www.jagruti.org
www.aidanindia.org 
www.daf-k.cjb.net