The burden of rabies in India is supposed to be 18,000 to 20,000 deaths per year as per the WHO figures.In my little over a six month period in eastern UP I have seen more dog-bites and rabid patients than I have seen in other parts of India.I saw young children,adolescents,older persons, a strapping sixteen year old with full blown features.Every other day we get patients with dog-bites,mongoose bites and the list goes on.Today I saw a five month old baby with a wild animal bite.You just walk out of the campus and one sees variety of stray dogs roaming around the country-side.
Everytime a person with a dog-bite walks in I give them a small lecture about awareness and the need to vocalise and demand vaccination of the stray dogs in the villages.Everyone gives me a blank stare and smiles happy to shell out the cost of the vaccine which must be taking a portion out of their daily earnings.
We even tried to bring it to the notice of one of the officers in the government.He coolly shrugged off the responsibility to another department.Humans may be affected but it is animals to blame!I was talking to one of the vetinary doctors who tell me that immunisation of thirty percent of the stray dogs would ensure herd immunisation and the rate of rabies would come down dramatically but in this mad world who will listen?
People from eastern UP are made up of sterner stuff.They will have a florid MI and will be wincing with pain but thrombolysis over and after 24 hours one of them asked me sardonically,'Will I keep sitting here or what?It is tough explaining the disease process to a patient who seems to have embraced the symptoms.
You dig a little deeper and you will see how they have embraced the hardships of life as normal.I have been left with my mouth wide open everyday of my life when I have taken the trouble to dig a little deeper.I met a man who had just bid farewell to his teenage son who had got burnt in a battery factory in Mumbai,he seems to have got a compensation of 2 lakhs.I met an old man whose daughter-in-law had comitted suicide a fortnight ago as a result of which both his sons were behind bars.I met a lady whose ancestral house she is living in has already been sold by her brother-in-law to a third party.Every now and then she comes to the out-patient with palpitations.I have seen a young father lying face down on a bed and bawling away next to a twelve year old son ranting on the next bed,rabid and the stories go on.....
Seventy years after independance my countrymen still think this is normal.Are we truly free,I wonder?
...but all these signs of utter poverty are nothing compared to the poverty of the human soul which does not see beyond themselves and theirs.
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