Despite huge investments in the health sector and vast manpower deployed, Uttar Pradesh has become a cauldron of diseases. Every second child in the state is under the threat of being attacked by diseases like encephalitis, measles, polio, dengue, malaria, tuberculosis, not to talk of diseases like diarrhoea of which no one keeps a record, but which has a high mortality rate.

In 2007, over 500 children died from an unknown strain of encephalitis virus, 305 children were affected with polio, and 2,556 with tuberculosis — the maximum in any state. In 2006, 548 children were affected with polio, there were 404 encephalitis deaths and 2,900 cases of pediatric tuberculosis.

This year, the monsoon has just begun and already 50 people have died due to an unknown encephalitis virus. Most of the dead were children. As many as 36 people have died due to measles and, again, a majority of them were children. In polio, Bihar may have overtaken UP, but the state still remains at second place, with 68 children affected so far this year.

Amid all this, an eight-year-old boy is lying unconscious for the past five months and is alive thanks to the food pipes inserted in his throat. He is the first case of a new virus — the West Nile virus — that has struck the state. The health officials, on the other hand, are clueless as to what line of treatment should be given in such cases.

The health officials in the state have ample excuses. For polio, they blame resistance to polio drops. For encephalitis, they say it is an unknown virus strain and they can do something only when the virus is identified. For diarrhoea deaths, they blame faulty water pipelines. For measles, it is superstition that prevents parents from consulting doctors. For tuberculosis, it is patients stopping treatment prematurely.

... contd.