It’s high time the Government should focus on preventing the spread of vector-borne diseases
While we keep talking about our top fatal diseases, most of them lifestyle and pollution-related, and India's escalating health vulnerability on the global scale, what we completely ignore is the epidemic that vector-borne diseases have become. Their resultant death toll has become a matter of textbook entry and since the victims are mostly from the lowest socio-economic strata, they are bunched under the disposable life index. The World Health Organistaion projections about India being the next malaria capital of the world by 2030 or the fact that the Aedes Aegyapti mosquito is creating havoc, manifesting itself through dengue, chikungunya, Japanese encephalitis and more stubborn variants almost three-fold in less than a decade, are of no concern.
Neither the loss of a sizeable part of our productive workforce, nor the desperation of a woman — who let her dengue-effected child die simply because she could not afford a prolonged treatment — are snapping us out of our self-induced paralysis. latest municipal reports say of the 2,215 cases of dengue recorded, 1,177 affected people were residents of Delhi, the rest being patients from other states. The same report listed the total number of malaria and chikungunya till September 16 to 869 and 472 respectively. What hasn't been quantified is that vector-borne diseases have arrived earlier this year and are predicted to become an annual crisis given the rapid climate change and increased temperatures.
Clearly, the Government needs to drop its knee-jerk reactive strategies of drumming up an information campaign only after the rains, readying hospitals at the 11th hour and taxing a healthcare system that is already stressed. The time to act is now, not waiting for people to fall sick but ensuring they do not in the first place. The axis of public health policy should change from a treatment-based protocol to an aggressively preventive one. The onus should shift from individual hygiene, clearing water pools or fumigation.
What's needed is a multi-dimensional approach: An effective vector control programme through mosquito sterilisation or creating a killer GM species as they did in Brazil and larvicides. Much needed are a parasite surveillance programme, research into rapidly mutating strains that evade diagnostic screening, establishing a pattern of behaviour and occurrence and reporting as much cases as possible through a network of field workers. It is also important to assess the health status of vulnerable or exposed communities and address the gaps in care delivery systems. Healthcare budget nationally is yet to move out of the single digit zone of the GDP and public health allocation in states is even measlier. Increased public health spending would certainly reap bigger benefits and bring down healthcare costs. If Sri lanka could become a zero-malaria country, we could tame our outbreaks too rather than being ambushed by them.