Shame!

A doctor belonging to that premier medical institute, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), died of dengue last week. He died not in some remote village where medical help was not available; not even in some hole-in-the-wall hospital with a dodgy reputation. He died at AIIMS, no less. It seems the virus led to internal bleeding and, although he was put on life support systems, his senior colleagues could not save him. That is not all. He was one of 12 medical students who have contracted the disease. Again, they are not in some remote village or in a jungle, but in the heart of New Delhi, in AIIMS. The one place that you might consider safe if you were unlucky enough to get the disease, seems not to be so. Does this point to deep rot in the public medical system?

The institute has a renowned doctor as its head, one who is supposed to be a dedicated professional and an excellent administrator. When the health minister tried to get him out some months ago for some imagined slight, the country rallied behind the doctor. Now he owes it to the country to explain exactly what is wrong with his fief. Just as fighting the minister was a matter of honour for him, this too should be one. Can he assure the country that there will not be a repeat of this episode? At a time when there has been a huge increase in the number of cases of dengue reported in the capital, with almost 450 people having got the disease and many more almost certain to follow, what does the public health system have to say for itself?

It is not enough to be content with the fatalistic explanation that such things will happen even in the most advanced of countries and in the best-run institutions. The suspicion is that a shocking episode like this points to deeper underlying problems that are usually not open to the public gaze, just as the Apollo Hospitals' handling of the Rahul Mahajan case raised urgent questions about the standards of medical conduct in corporate hospitals. That particular episode seems to have been brushed under the carpet or is buried in some file that will get lost; it would be doubly tragic if systemic problems in even a premier public institution were to be treated with similar callousness and cynicism.