Mourning those killed by the Union Carbide disaster, on the occasion of its 36th anniversary on Wednesday, members of the Sambhavna Trust clinic held a candlelight vigil near the statue of the Bhopal Mother opposite the long-abandoned pesticide factory.
Family members of gas victims who died due to COVID 19 this year joined the NGO members in resolving to continue with efforts to improve the health and healthcare of people poisoned by Union Carbide.
“This year in Bhopal,COVID 19 has killed gas exposed people at a rate of over six times the average rate in the district.Most possibly this is because of the higher than usual rates of lung, heart and kidney diseases, Type 2 diabetes, and compromised immunity in the gas-exposed population that makes them more vulnerable. These figures underline both the toxicity of Union Carbide’s gases as well as the current need for improvements in the healthcare of the survivors.” said Dr Sanjay Shrivastav, Physician at the Sambhavna Trust clinic.
Speaking about their community-based work to fight the Pandemic in Bhopal, Sangeeta Choursiya said, “Along with close to a hundred community health volunteers and staff from the ChingariRehabilitation centre we have brought down the Pandemic’s toll in a population of 40, 000 for the last eight months. This has been achieved through awareness building, house to house visits and data collection, testing and medical support, material support to those in need and most of all through involvement of members of the community. The area of our work and the number of Community Health Volunteers has actually doubled by the Pandemic.”
Located in the midst of the area most severely affected by the disaster, the Sambhavna Trust Clinic provides free long term care to the survivors of the disaster. In the last 24 years of its running, the Clinic has used a mix of modern medicine, Ayurveda, Panchakarma and Yoga to develop treatment protocols for the exposure induced multisystemic chronic diseases of over 35,000 persons. Since its inception, the Clinic has been run solely through small donations by a large number of individuals.