The New York Times takes note of encephalitis in Gorakhpur and much else: Can India Stop Its Children From Dying? Excerpt:
Bengaluru, India — Two children younger than 5 die every minute in India. Even by India’s easy acceptance of child mortality, the death of 70 children within five days at a hospital in the northern city of Gorakhpur was hard to accept.
A majority of the children who died had been struck by Japanese encephalitis, a mosquito-borne, potentially fatal viral brain infection that periodically ravages the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. But the immediate reason for at least half the deaths appeared to be the cessation of piped oxygen into the intensive care ward. Japanese encephalitis has no known cure, and as it progresses, patients require oxygen to survive.
Despite 11 reminders over six months, the Uttar Pradesh government did not pay the company that supplied oxygen to the Baba Raghav Das Medical College hospital. The company acknowledged it had threatened to stop supplies but denied it had actually done so. The state administration, with its own role in question, vaguely promised “stringent action against the guilty.”
In a country chronically short of medical facilities, the Baba Raghav Das hospital is the largest and most important referral hospital in a poor, populous region, serving a population of more than 50 million in hundreds of nearby towns and villages. Stunned parents — carpenters, construction workers, security guards, homemakers and others from poor families — streamed out of the hospital with the bodies of their dead children.
Many said the police had removed them from the hospital after their children died. Some who sought autopsies were told to bring masks and gloves for coroners, suggesting the breadth and depth of the state’s health care crisis.
Gorakhpur, a city of nearly 700,000, is home to Yogi Adityanath, a controversial monk and Hindu nationalist politician who was chosen by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be chief minister of this, India’s most populous state, in March. Mr. Adityanath, who has a penchant for hate speech against Muslims and faces accusations of rioting and attempted murder, has politically dominated Gorakhpur and the adjacent region and represented it in the Indian parliament from 1998 to 2014.
Although disregard for human life is common in India, the images of dead children from the Gorakhpur hospital were followed by intense criticism. “This is not just a tragedy, it is a massacre,” Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian Nobel laureate, tweeted.
Indian politicians are expected to look after their home constituencies, but Mr. Adityanath defended his record and dismissed allegations that his government was criminally negligent at worst and incompetent at best. One reason for the deaths, he said, is that “we do not lead a clean and hygienic life.”
Several leaders from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party played down the tragedy. Amit Shah, the powerful B.J.P. president and Mr. Modi’s confidante, said, “In such a big country, many incidents happen; this isn’t the first time an incident like this has happened.”
Irrespective of the local government’s political ideologies, Gorakhpur and Uttar Pradesh have repeatedly witnessed mass death from disease, grim reminders of the state of its public-health system. The Baba Raghav Das hospital’s records reveal that 3,000 children have died within its walls since 2012.
