It is the season of distress yet again. News reports filter in partial images from different locales: heat strokes in and mass exodus from Andhra Pradesh, malaria and encephalitis deaths in Assam, and ´monsoon-induced´ diarrhoea, influenza epidemics and measles outbreaks in many of Nepal´s districts.
The list of ´medical´ afflictions'for this calendar year was long already, and now with the arrival of the monsoon it seems to be unending. Cough, cold, headache, high fever, jaundice, dysentery, diarrhoea, vomiting, flu, heat, dehydration, measles, typhoid, and acute respiratory infection are here, and presumably there is more to come. The Kathmandu Post on 5 March, 2003, reported that jaundice, detected in a few persons sometime earlier, had broken out on an epidemic scale in Manthali, headquarters of Ramechaap district of Nepal.
News coming in from the so-called 'remote' districts has been grim. There have been several reports of children, women and the elderly falling prey to some ´mystery´ disease or the other. Such is the regularity with which this kind of news has appeared that the death of such large numbers of people is no longer scandalous. We have been seeing them year after year in the same form and magnitude, with occasional variations in detail and presentation, sometimes on the front page or, more often, tucked away in the corner of the ´region´' page. The irony is that this spate of reports only partially represents what is really happening in Nepal, and that is voluminous enough to inure reader to the repetitive daily rituals of death, often attributed to various unspecified diseases.
In the first week of February 2003, for example, six people, four of them children from the Chepang community, died of measles in Makwanpur´s interior villages, south of Kathmandu valley. Several hundreds, mainly children, were taken ill but eventually recovered. In the same village, reports say, almost all of the children have severely low body weight. According to a report published by a Kathmandu-based NGO working among the Chepang community for several years, in some villages members of this community have among the lowest life expectancies in Nepal–less than 30 years, which is half the national average. Of course, the same reports also tell us, tangentially though, that the people so affected by disease and death have been living in a state of chronic hunger for years in this area. It is a different matter that journalists blame "lack of health services and inadequate drug supply" for the deaths.