West Bengal’s health administration was on the mat over the weekend on two counts that might not be wholly unrelated. Between them, the twin developments have reaffirmed the shoddy handling of potentially mortal dengue that has already claimed 38 lives, going by the department’s modest estimate. One, Calcutta High Court has binned the state government’s dengue deaths report as “controversial and contradictory”. The other is the Health secretary’s warning that registration of government doctors would be cancelled if they continue to advise patients to be diagnosed and treated in private hospitals. This lends a new dimension to the degree of sloth in the health administration. In parallel, it begs the question whether the government doctors, or at least a section thereof, are in cahoots with private establishments. It shall not be easy for the health department to shore up its credibility in the context of the court’s observation that the report had omitted the names of four persons who have died of dengue despite the fact that their death certificates had been furnished to the Bench.

In other words, even certified deaths are not being acknowledged by the government in its anxiety to minimise the death toll. The resounding observation of acting Chief Justice Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya has been riveted to the fundamentals of medical attention and is intended to clear the fog over an affliction that has assumed endemic proportions in West Bengal ~ “The state will in an affidavit make clear what steps have been taken. The state will also say what action has been taken to send mobile units to remote areas to carry out tests. It will also have to state what plans it has to compensate the victims”. Over the past three months, the state has failed miserably on all the three parameters. Not to put too fine a point on it, the judiciary has rapped the executive on its knuckles. Blaming private establishments for their “disagreeable” diagnosis has been a convoluted exercise in self-deception. No less a cause for alarm is the provocation that has driven the health secretary to warn of a crackdown on state doctors who refer patients to private hospitals.

However obliquely, these doctors have exposed the wherewithal of the state’s establishments, not to forget the negligent nonchalance of the doctors and supporting staff. This, it has been admitted at the highest level of the health department’s administrative structure, is “brisk business” for those who are engaged in the fiddle. The Secretary’s order may be unprecedented, but it is improbable that this money-spinning is a recent racket in state hospitals, let alone the decrepit rural health centres. Small wonder that dengue has been largely undiagnosed and untreated. The impact on medical treatment generally is a collective shame. Rightly has the West Bengal Medical Council been notified.