Swine flu claims two in manipur

FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

IMPHAL March 11: Todaya at least two women died of swine flu in a private hospital and this has galvanised the government into a flurry of activity. All these days some scheming officials have been misleading the people and the government with false claims and promises. One woman who was confirmed to be a patient of swine flu died in a private hospital in Imphal. The husband had brought her to Regiol Institute of Medical Sciences, Imphal. However there was no medicine and medical facilities for a patient suffering from swine flu. There was no ventilator for a patient. Besides doctors advised him to take away the woman to a private hospital. When he admitted the wife to the private hospital he had started having second thoughts since the fees were astronomical. He brought back to RIMS. But he had to take heer away since there was no treatment worth mentioning.

In the meantime one official of the health department has been shouting from the housetop on what he had purportedly done for the patients as a whole. He launched a media blitz on how person to person transmission of the disease could be checked. Interestingly he did not say anything how in the first place a person gets infected. During a public speech which was tape recorded he was reported to have said that 95 per cent of the patients get cured without even medication and

there is no need for panic. He also appealed to the people not to spread rumour since this is a curable disease and the department has stocked enough medicine.

However talking to reporters the distraught husband said that there was no medicine in the government hospital forcing him to take the half conscious wife to the private hospital. The health officials have not even made a visit to his wife. The govenment has not given any assistance to the family which was facing stigma. The school van driver has refused to pick, ferry and drop their children. In an out of the way gesture the maging director of the private hospital promised to slash the hospital bill and ask the government to give some assistances to the family.

The woman who had lost consciousness some days ago died this morning.

Another woman also died. Though the laboratory results of heer swab samples are awaited hospital sources said that she was a swine flu patient. Both the women are from the Imphal east district. Sources said that results of some more persons are awaited. There is no explation as to why these women had to die if the health officials had taken up necessary steps to treat them. There is growing fear that some more patients may die since the medines and arrangements had been made only in paper.

The government has also not educated the people on the source of this disease and precious nothing has been done to check the same as a preventive measure.

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