NEWSWEEK, JUNE 21, 1971
A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE
The flood of Bengali refugees from East Pakistan into India began to subside last week, but the battle being waged against the cholera epidemic they brought with them still went on. More than 5,000 refugees already had died of cholera; at the peak of the epidemic, gravediggers became so exhausted that they could not work, and the supply of wood for burning bodies in the traditional Hindu way was completely used up. Although chartered planes arrived daily bringing shipments of food, hospital equipment and medicines, India still had received barely one-tenth of the $200 million in foreign aid that it needs to care for the estimated 5 million refugees. “What was claimed to be the internal problem of Pakistan,” India’s Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi told a deeply concerned Parliament in New Delhi last week, “has now become an internal problem for India.”
For all the disheartening statistics, however, India’s medical service is performing impressively. “I cannot say that the epidemic is diminishing,’ says R. N. Gupta, chief social-welfare officer at the Krishnanagar hospital in Nadia, among the hardest-hit provinces. “We still get from SO to 100 cases every day. The difference is that, this week we are able to get almost everyone into the hospital for treatment. Last week, the numbers were so great that many people died on the road before they reached us.”
But although the roads in Nadia are now almost clear of cholera victims, the hospitals still teem with helpless, retching patients. One treatment center, run by a Catholic nursing order, the Sisters of Mary. Immaculate, was built recently as a maternity hospital; it was opened prematurely two weeks ago to care for cholera cases and has yet to admit its first expectant mother. The building’s corridors are lined with small children lying on cots and bottles suspended above them drip a life-giving saline solution into their gaunt bodies, “The effect is quite remarkable,” cabled Newsweek’s Tony Clifton last week. “They literally have life, pumped back into them, and you can see them gradually gaining strength as the bottle empties.” Some of the patients arc beyond any help at all. But by working almost around the clock, the hospital’s beleaguered staff of two doctors and eight nurses has so far managed to save all but eighteen of the first 425 cholera cases to be admitted.
“We send our ambulances out to pick people off the roads,” explains Sister Immaculate, the plump, thirtieth doctor who runs the hospital. “Some of them have been lying out in the mud and rain and are completely collapsed. Yet unless they are literally on the point of death we can cure most of them. That girl” she adds pointing to a peacefully sleeping teen-ager, “was brought in with no pulse and no sign of breathing. We poured saline solution into her, and now she is all right. Some of these people need a gallon of fluid before they recover, but with proper care, they can leave the hospital in two or three days.” The treatment only works because of the dedication of the doctors and nurses. We are with them all the time,” says Sister Immaculate, “and we spend a lot of money on each one -anything up to 60 rupees ($ 7) per
person.”
The nulls’ hospital is something of a special case, because it is new and has private funds; few hospitals in Nadia can afford to spend even 60 rupees on each patient. The Krishnanagar hospital is more typical. Normally equipped to handle 25 patients, it now accommodates more than 400, many of whom huddle with their families under a vast orange tent that has been set up next to the building itself. The supply of sheets ran out long ago, and most of the mattresses have been contaminated by body wastes. The patients lie on tin trays 6 feet long and 3 feet wide covered by thin strips of badly stained cheesecloth. Flies are everywhere, and the noise and smell are overpowering. The workload for the hollow-eyed doctors and nurses is so heavy that one of them collapsed and died last week from exhaustion. Yet despite the squalor, the hospital functions with surprising effectiveness, and only about 8 percent of its patients have died.
Typhoid: The refugees from Pakistan’s civil war still face many perils in the Indian camps. “What we fear now is a typhoid epidemic,” says Gupta of the Krishnanagar hospital. “There are nearly half a million people living in camps or along the roads around here. Many of them have been drinking contaminated water, and most of them arc weakened by the very strenuous journeys they had to get here. The conditions for typhoid are ideal.”
Perhaps in recognition of India’s continuing predicament, the government of Pakistan is trying to lure the refugees home by offering them a general amnesty and by promising them food, shelter, medical care and transportation to their old homes. According to one estimate last week, several thousand Bengalis have already crossed the border back into Pakistan to accept the offer. But so far, most of the homeless 5 million seem to think that, even with all its problems, India is a better place to live right now.