Lessons from the measles tragedy.

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Lessons from the measles tragedy

 

Saturday April 26 2008 09:02 IST

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.

Think Simply. Think Wisely. Curb Semantics. Speak the Truth.

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