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 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.

This begs a few questions: What is the paraphernalia of the health department there for? Can’t the state Government effectively intervene in any of these cases? Why is there not even one success story when crores of rupees are being pumped into the sector every year?

Experts say that the basic problem lies in handling children’s healthcare in a piecemeal fashion. “Malnutrition and resultant lack of immunity among children could be one of the reasons. But the state health machinery mainly reacts to ‘cases’. Year after year, we are failing in the disease control mechanism,” says Dr T N Dhole, microbiologist at Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences.

Dhole added that fogging and disease control activities were supposed to start before the monsoon. But even though the rains are here, the district authorities do not have their plans in place to control these diseases.

Dr Nimal Hettiaratchy, UNICEF Representative to Uttar Pradesh, said that while investment in improving the health system was important, “it also needs to be backed by improvement in community hygiene, availability of safe drinking water and improved level of nutrition which are very closely linked with maintaining a healthy state”.

“The treatment of diseases gets the lion’s share of healthcare expenditure, but the silent emergency of malnutrition is neglected. More than 50 per cent children in the state are malnourished. The chance of a malnourished child dying from a common ailment is significantly higher than that of a well-fed child,” said Hettiaratchy.

He also underlined the problem of sub-optimal utilisation of health services. For example, despite availability of immunisation services, only 23 per cent children were fully immunised against the six vaccine-preventable deadly diseases till last year. He linked this to lack of public awareness, lack of ability to access the services, and the “perceived poor quality of public health services in the state”.