It flu over their heads

While the government's busy grunting away to glory, it's the citizens who're bearing the brunt of yet another horrible epidemic

It flu over their heads

While the government's busy grunting away to glory, it's the citizens who're bearing the brunt of yet another horrible epidemic. Be it the bird flu, Surat plague, SARS, dengue, malaria, small pox or chikengunia, it's our negligent authorities who manage to play dirty, ironically, by washing their hands off the whole thing when it most requires the attention. On paper, the government has demonstrated the 'required and needed' level of seriousness. If only theory did it. Every year, it is only after the disease has taken its toll that the authorities pull up their socks.

From my past experiences as a health and civic body reporter, I have watched that whenever the first death is reported in the media, civic officials and councilors start their routine drama of fogging, checking coolers and city potholes for water logging, and suspending the lowest-level karamcharis. What efficiency.

And alas, swine flu has flown in from the West, unlike other lowly plagues which the big babus thought they were well insulated from. It is, in fact, reverse discriminatory, with the first few cases being reported in uber-technologized uptowns. For once, politicians sitting in their comfy citadels of power should fear for their life, if not others'. But of course, their casual overpowered the list of casualties, till we encountered the worst case scenario that we see now.u00a0

I won't be surprised, and neither should you, if in the coming days, the government was to set up a committee to investigate the accountability for the swine flu debacle, and after several months and lakhs spent, the research would be declared 'inconclusive,' and nobody held accountable for the lapse. The pig phrase would then sound like an apt metaphor.

What has now turned into nationwide panic could've well been checked, had the government set up proper screening at airports. Even now, I have my doubts about how hospitals are handling suspected cases. Let's suppose, five persons visit a designated hospital for check-up and sample testing. Do medical authorities keep them isolated from each other, along with isolating them from the rest of the world? What if all the five are kept together, and the result shows only one of them positive? It's high time they realised the deadly strain isn't sleeping over it, the way they are.u00a0

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