MUMBAI: For doctors and health care workers in India’s financial capital Mumbai who are grappling with surging coronavirus infections, the onset of the annual monsoon poses a serious threat — a new wave of patients with vector-borne diseases.
Already stretched by a shortage of medics and critical care beds, the situation in Mumbai might turn uglier, health experts warn, as cases of malaria, dengue, leptospirosis and encephalitis are expected to soar in coming months.
“Mumbai will be dealing with a crisis in the monsoon,” said Kamakshi Bhate, professor emeritus of community medicine at the state-run King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, noting there is typically a surge in hospital bed occupancy due to such diseases during India’s annual June-September monsoon season.
Water-logged streets are a common sight every monsoon across India. But in Mumbai, its most populous city, monsoons can often bring life to a standstill with flooding and water-logging, and result in a surge of diseases.
In a report, local NGO Praja Foundation said official data from only government-run hospitals showed Mumbai recorded about 32,000 malaria and dengue cases in 2018, but the NGO said its own household survey indicated more than 200,000 cases of just those two diseases in the city that year.
This year the city’s hospitals are already overrun. Mumbai has been hit the hardest by COVID-19. About 25 percent of India’s 297,535 coronavirus cases and roughly 29 percent of the 8,498 deaths recorded have come from the city and its surrounding suburbs.
Suresh Kakani, an additional commissioner at Mumbai’s civic authority, said it was asking clinics and dispensaries, some of which had shut during a two-month long nationwide lockdown, to re-open.
Drains are being cleaned and stored water in houses were being inspected for larvae, Kakani said, adding that while major hospitals were on treating COVID patients, smaller nursing homes would be available to handle other cases.
But, with local hospitals already strained by significant staff shortages, heath experts fear the spread of diseases in Mumbai’s slums could compound issues for a health care network already reeling from COVID-19 cases.
“We have a number of slums in low-lying areas and they are prone to flooding and disease,” said Brinelle D’Souza, a health activist with Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, a local non-governmental organization.
D’Souza said that while many isolation beds were available for patients with mild COVID-19 symptoms, the city, home to about 20 million people, needed substantially more critical care beds with oxygen supplies and ventilators.
India’s Mumbai braces for monsoon diseases amid strain of a pandemic
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India’s Mumbai braces for monsoon diseases amid strain of a pandemic
- Cases of malaria, dengue, leptospirosis and encephalitis are expected to soar in coming months
- Mumbai has been hit the hardest by COVID-19
Top Australian writers’ festival canceled after Palestinian author barred
- 180 authors boycotted the event and its director resigned after a Palestinian author was disinvited
SYDNEY: One of Australia’s top writers’ festivals was canceled on Tuesday, after 180 authors boycotted the event and its director resigned saying she could not be party to silencing a Palestinian author and warned moves to ban protests and slogans after the Bondi Beach mass shooting threatened free speech.
Louise Adler, the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, said on Tuesday she was quitting her role at the Adelaide Writers’ Week in February, following a decision by the festival’s board to disinvite a Palestinian-Australian author.
The novelist and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah said the move to bar her was “a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday announced a national day of mourning would be held on January 22 to remember the 15 people killed in last month’s shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach.
Police say the alleged gunmen were inspired by the Islamic State militant group, and the incident sparked nationwide calls to tackle antisemitism, and prompted state and federal government moves to tighten hate speech laws.
The Adelaide Festival board said on Tuesday its decision last week to disinvite Abdel-Fattah, on the grounds it would not be culturally sensitive for her to appear at the literary event “so soon after Bondi,” was made “out of respect for a community experiencing the pain from a devastating event.”
“Instead, this decision has created more division and for that we express our sincere apologies,” the board said in a statement.
The event would not go ahead and remaining board members will step down, it added.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, British author Zadie Smith, Australian author Kathy Lette, Pulitzer Prize-winning American Percival Everett and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis are among the authors who said they would no longer appear at the festival in South Australia state, Australian media reported.
The festival board on Tuesday apologized to Abdel-Fattah for “how the decision was represented.”
“This is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history,” it added.
Abdel-Fattah wrote on social media that she did not accept the apology, saying she had nothing to do with the Bondi attack, “nor did any Palestinian.”
Adler earlier wrote in The Guardian that the board’s decision to disinvite Abdel-Fattah “weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation, where lobbying and political pressure determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t.”
The South Australian state government has appointed a new festival board.
