HE is one Chaudhry these days obscured by the Chaudhrys busy fighting for family honour and election glory. And he is angry at his work having been eclipsed by the media obsession with election and electoral campaigns.
The Chaudhry in question is a health reporter in Lahore. Even though he is forever burdened with the heaviness of his beat, he has fallen unusually quiet these days. Prick him with an inquiry and he explodes: “Election! All we want to talk about these days is election. So what if children are dying in this city of a disease which could have been prevented?”
Clearly, the measles outbreak is the straw that makes it so very unbearable. For you know the species called journalist is not easy to move.
Chaudhry himself is a veteran of dim, dark and foul-smelling hospitals. This is where he spends his days, chasing and choosing stories, often intervening with a doctor on behalf of one of his friends who frequently fall ill. It can be said that breaking into a specialist’s chamber with the request for treatment of a patient gives him as much satisfaction as breaking the horror stories the hospitals are such big nurseries of.
He has seen death at close range more often than most would want to read about in the paper, reporting, campaigning, taking sides and ruffling feathers when he all along knew that those who decide are not going to be always receptive to his habitual calls for emergency.
He has trudged on willy-nilly, but he appears to be finally losing patience — in the sense of the helplessness of a man who must keep his eyes and ears open to the unending wailing around him. The brief stay and the silent exit of the ‘victims’ of measles has scarred him deep.
Yes, victims these souls are called. Patients also, but more often, plain victims. Over the last few days, a line of these young Pakistanis have died at Lahore hospitals amid all these thunderous election speeches about the need for discovering a young country.
This rhetoric has found prime space in the media, while little Pakistani citizens who failed to draw their elders’ attention to their basic needs during their lifetime die a by and large unmourned death.
Chaudhry’s reminders are brutal. Once again he talks about a blundering government which couldn’t keep its pledge to the citizens and broke its promises to the outside world demanding that we immunise our children.
The gentleman is certainly disturbed and could do with time away from the front he has been long fighting on. Maybe a dose of politics for some time. Or he could scour his territory for stories of hope: like the accounts of those who have managed to find saviours amid these shouts about the killers who can never be pinned down.
A detour to the positive would do those who bring us details from the hospitals a world of good but in Lahore of late there has been absolutely no respite. Disease has been advancing on us like battalions of an army.
Health is always a happening beat and the paper is never in short supply of horrifying stories of patients and the facilities where they are treated or not treated. The last few years have, however, been particularly busy for those covering matters at the hospitals in Lahore.
There have been deaths caused by the adulterated medicine distributed at the Punjab Institute of Cardiology, there has been a dengue epidemic, and men looking to ‘drown their sorrows’ have succumbed to a substandard cough syrup. And then there have been deaths by more natural causes, and also there has been a long doctors’ strike with its own deadly connotations.
All these incidents have been flashed in the media, the government has been blamed and inquiries and damage-control drives ordered. At the end of all these grand exhibitions in which our collective conscience is shown to have awoken, we are hardly any more vigilant than we were before we received these shocks one after the other.
As usual, the news of measles outbreaks a few months ago was received with quite a lot of sympathy for the ‘victims’ but no real alarm: as always the old defence mechanism was switched on and again it was something happening at a distance from our safe havens.
In discussions quite a lot of people here appeared to be trying to convince themselves that it was a disease that had its origins in the floods two years ago and just as the city had avoided the floods back then it would avoid its fallout now. Soon, the false fortress was penetrated and there were reports of deaths by measles in ‘our own’ Lahore.
If the city dwellers’ defence against the ‘distant’ threat was based on callous notions of personal security, official efforts at stopping the spread of measles were nowhere in sight.
It was as if the officials, too, believed that it would die down without causing too much damage — even though precious lives had already been lost before it became an issue worthy of being taken up at high-level governmental meetings and at public forums including parliament.
In January, the federal minister of health admitted in parliament there had been problems with the immunisation programme.
Yet, a city comparatively as well provided for as Lahore had to wait at least another two months before calls urgently went out for accelerating the vaccination programme.
Once again the government had other priorities. The focus was on the grand, all-important election and no one had the time for small matters as the immunisation of children. So what if the enemy had already raised its head? Democracy calls for sacrifice.
The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.