Health workers are:
- Improperly trained, and
- No more than four in 10 of Gorakhpur’s children have received adequate vaccine protection for Japanese encephalitis (JE).
JE is the viral brain infection implicated in the deaths of many of the over 70 children at Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das Medical (BRD) Medical College hospital. It’s a “mediocre” institution serving an area particularly vulnerable to JE.
Such are the conclusions of Milind Gore, 62, a former scientist from India’s premier virus-research establishment, the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune. Gore moved from Pune to Gorakhpur in 2008 – two years after the government launched the first immunisation drive to vaccinate children up to 15 in Uttar Pradesh’s (UP’s) JE endemic areas – to set up NIV’s Gorakhpur unit, which is in the BRD Medical College campus.
An incurable disease whose symptoms must be managed with medical attention until the patient, if strong enough, overcomes the infection, JE is not new to eastern UP, and the NIV unit was set up after the mosquito-borne virus swept through the area between July and November 2005, infecting 5,737 people and claiming 1,334 lives. It was the longest and most severe JE epidemic UP had seen since the disease first surfaced 40 years ago in 1977.
High temperature and relative humidity during the monsoons make the transmission of the virus from the mosquito to humans easier.
The government has made immunisation against JE part of routine immunisation in 198 endemic Indian districts. However, immunisation has not reached all of Gorakhpur’s needy children.
In a 2015 survey, only 42.3 percent of Gorakhpur division’s eligible children had had the two recommended doses of JE vaccination, according to an Indian Journal of Medical Research paper published in January 2017, co-authored by Gore.
The health workers believed that simultaneously administering multiple vaccinations could overload children’s immune system and increase the risk of side effects, so they asked mothers (or fathers) to return for the JE vaccination. The low coverage suggests that many parents who lived a “hand-to-mouth” existence, as Gore put it, did not return.
In 2015, three in four children aged 25-36 months in Gorakhpur division had received at least one dose of JE vaccine, according to Gore’s co-authored paper published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research in January 2017. Less than half (42.3 percent) the children aged 25-36 months had had two doses. And one in three of the eligible children missed the JE vaccine altogether.
IndiaSpend talked to Gore for a firsthand account of the challenges facing the JE immunisation programme, halting the spread of JE in Gorakhpur and ensuring that JE patients are medically cared for. Here’s what he had to say:
A: In a part of India where people lead a hand-to-mouth existence, women would rather go to work and earn a day’s wage than take time off to take their child to the nearest primary health centre for immunisation. A door-to-door immunisation campaign would be more effective. It also does not help that rural women do not understand the importance of the immunisation card they are given. Cards frequently get misplaced. So it becomes hard to determine if a child has had one or two shots of a certain vaccine or none at all.
Rumour-mongering, which is easy where people are illiterate, can hamper immunisation efforts. When the first immunisation drive for children started back in 2006, a rumour that the vaccine can cause disease and was no good kept a lot of people away.
Human memory tends to be short-lived; when the health worker presses parents to get their child immunised they say ‘Everything is okay, what is the need for immunisation?’
Sometimes, the media do not realise how hard it is to bring about change at the grassroots level in India. Once, we achieved 80 percent coverage in an immunisation drive – which is good. But when word got out that we were planning to go back to the area to cover those children who had missed their shots, it was reported on the lines of, ‘Immunisation drive misses out 20 percent children’. This is disheartening for ground workers.
Q: How would you rate the BRD Medical College as a tertiary care centre? Is it capable of handling the sort of serious cases and the patient load that comes to it?
A: I was recently taken by surprise to hear the Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath say that BRD Medical College is a referral centre for five crore (50 million) people. I had never realised it serves so many. Now that I think about it, the actual number of people that seek its services is probably around six crore (60 million), if you also consider the population of the three neighbouring districts of Bihar for whom this hospital is closer than the nearest tertiary care centre in their own state.
The hospital is mediocre as a health facility. Speaking with relevance to this incident, I am sure it is not the only government health centre in India where a chalta hai (make do) attitude has worsened the quality of patient care it is capable of and caused a tragedy.
A: At the most, 15 to 20 minutes. The failure of oxygen supply played a role in causing the 63 deaths (the death toll when this interview was conducted) of children in Gorakhpur. This fact is now out in the public domain.
Although the immediate cause of death of those 63 children in Gorakhpur was most likely the failure of oxygen supply, it is true that sanitation and hygiene play a big role in the spread of vector-borne diseases such as JE and dengue. Why have successive state governments not been able to improve conditions on the ground in Gorakhpur?
JE persists in Gorakhpur for the same reason that India has not been able to root out dengue from Delhi, despite the fact that it is the national capital and, therefore, one would assume, has greater resources at its disposal than eastern UP. It takes sustained efforts to effect change on the ground. Sporadic cleanliness campaigns will not work. Effort must also be made to make the messaging effective.
I recollect, when we were training health workers to impart hygiene information to the rural population, at one point, we realised how futile it was to conduct the training in Hindi. The local people speak Purvi. So we got the health workers to learn their lines in Purvi. Then, we realised that people were sure to have questions, so we brainstormed and asked the health workers what people’s reservations might be and prepared responses in Purvi. We actually role-played the situation in Purvi.
A: JE is a viral disease, which means unlike a bacterial disease that requires the prescription of an antibiotic, it is treated symptomatically. A big challenge to the management of the disease at the PHC level is the general perception in rural people’s minds–and I have seen this not just in Gorakhpur–is that PHCs are no good.
It is also a fact that JE patients can be challenging to manage. Imagine a child suffering from seizures, frothing at the mouth, with or without respiratory distress.
It is safe to say that most PHC workers are insufficiently trained to manage these symptoms, especially when they occur simultaneously. Also, PHCs are not equipped with respiratory support machines.
So families end up taking their loved ones to a nearby city or referral centre, in this case the BRD Medical College.
For instance, patients tend to be transferred in the supine (lying face upwards) position, which for a JE patient, can cause the accumulated froth to flow back down into the lungs, exacerbating the respiratory distress and even causing secondary infection. People may not know that they must place a soft cloth between the teeth of a JE patient suffering seizures to prevent self-harm.
During my time in Gorakhpur, once, we developed pictorial pamphlets for distribution to create awareness of handling and transferring JE patients. Awareness drives must be ongoing or at least where JE is concerned, stepped up prior to the monsoon season.
A: Only one in 500 people infected with JE actually presents clinical symptoms. The rest are strong enough to withstand the virus. This is true of dengue as well. Dengue is endemic to areas like Delhi and Lucknow but not to other parts of UP. During my years in Gorakhpur, I heard of instances of children of well-to-do families in UP being sent to study in Delhi in June, and falling prey to dengue in July/August.
All the 63 victims of JE in this incident in Gorakhpur were children. I do not know their exact ages but I am pretty certain their age and overall health status was not on their side. Malnourishment lowers immunity.
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan. This article was first published on IndiaSpend.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)
Published: undefined