When Shaikat's mother went off to cook in the kitchen that afternoon, she was confident that her 19-month-old son was safe with his grandmother in the courtyard. Not realising that the child had been left under her care, the old lady, however, had been paying little attention. Shaikat wandered out of the house unnoticed. Twenty minutes later, when the family panicked and rushed out looking for him, they discovered Shaikat's body floating on the surface of a pond less than 30 metres away from the house.
Residents of a village in Sherpur district, four hours from Dhaka, the family was unfortunate — it had to cope with a senseless loss of a loved one and the hopes the infant represented. What makes Shaikat's death even more striking is the fact that he was hardly alone. He was but one among the 83 or so children in Bangladesh who would have died that day due to accident and injury. Drowning would have accounted for 46 of those deaths.
Bangladesh, says a health and injury study released earlier this year, is in the midst of a "previously unrecognised epidemic of child injury deaths". The largest community-based injury survey ever conducted in the developing world, the Bangladesh Health and Injury Study (BHIS) covered 171,000 households and more than 800,000 people. The results are so startling that it is important not only to consider them, but also to try and understand why something this grave, which affects so many young and innocent lives, has not even been flagged as an issue of public health.
Getting Hurt