Flu questions

One's entry back in the homeland is greeted with a line of doctors with masks seated behind the immigration desks. You are directed to go up and present a form you filled up in the plane, about the countries you visited and whether you have certain symptoms.

Its a 5 second meeting, and you go off to collect your baggage, in a chaotic area populated by some in masks, many without, a maze of carts and bags, and a few helpful staff , asking if you wanted help, with swinging your bags of the circulating belt and loading the cart, all , for a price.

With the amount of news trickling in about the closure of markets, schools, colleges , here and there, and rumors about masks disappearing from shops (to enhance illegal profit), thanks to a government making them available only on prescription, I expected some kind of heat sensing probes that someone would track the passengers with, as they came in. I half expected stuff to beep and maybe weed out the "hotter" ones for further investigations.

None observed.

Amidst the massive lethargic flow of traffic , stranded next to a rush hour bus for several minutes, one wonders at the level of protection available to a few masked types, all standees in the bus aisle, about 50 people crushed in an area meant for 22. Like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces have curves, and they fit in tight against each other. Most without masks. Just worried about their own square foot of floor and the possibility of reaching the exit door in time. The kind of crowd that would have made even the H1N1 virus stare.

Come the monsoon, every year, folks in Mumbai go through a viral scare. Chest experts give interviews and advice in newspapers, statistics are flashed around, water contamination is highlighted, students miss more school than usual. There is talk of water borne diseases and mosquito diseases. Typhoid cholera, leptospirosis, malaria, faliciparum malaria, and various gastroenteric upsets do the rounds. Incidences of these recede with the monsoon, the city cools a bit , and the world carries on.

Just a few questions.

Given our population, our crowds, our levels of city sanitation thanks to homelessness of the worst type, and the little pleasures afforded by vices like tobacco, Tuberculosis (TB) in India currently kills 2 people every 3 minutes. It is spread through the air by a person suffering from TB. A single patient can infect 10 or more people in a year. Every year, 1.8 million persons develop the disease, of which about 800,000 are infectious; and, until recently, 370,000 died of it annually —1,000 every day.

Given that this disease, to mention just one, is so rampant, one never hears of a similar hype regarding it. The The Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP) based on WHO recommendations, continues to administer, treat, followup and research all aspects of the disease.

No one, including foreign visitors to the worst slum areas in Mumbai wears masks and stuff on an ongoing basis. Our trains carrying several times the number of people they are supposed to, are used everyday by thousands of people of all ages, during epidemics, monsoons, and other crowded occasions. You can actually get lost in a major vegetable market near railway stations at rush hour.

Why is no fuss made about this ? Why are Swine flu fear scenarios being enacted by keeping schools, colleges, and markets closed , in a city like Pune ? Does it behove the Health minister to micromanage and advise schools to stop their morning assemblies and sports (but keep the school classes going), and forget that the same students will sit together in classrooms, which are not exactly sterile ? While we hear of path labs being overburdened by the onslaught of cases that land up more because of fear than actual symptoms, is any thought being given to more staff being sanctioned for the already overburdened government path labs who are testing patients for the disease ?

While Tamiflu has now attained star status, thanks to unscrupulous types hiking the unofficial price consequent to demand outstripping supply, is a strict vigil being maintained on the quality assurance aspect of the medicine , which often appears in rural markets in its counterfeit avatar , to the detriment of a patient?

There is talk of a Swine Flu vaccine . There is also a recent report from Britain about the likelihood of of people using this vaccine developing the Guillaine Barre Syndrome , a paralysing disease . We read about the National Institute of Virology getting this vaccine ready by October 2009 etc . Has the Guillaine Barre aspect of it been verified ?

How come, in a so called pandemic of major proportions, we hear a Health Minister making populist general statements, but there is no authoritative scholarly medical official statement made, by those who are experts, at, say, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, (hitherto known for disagreements between its erstwhile Head and the former Health Minister) ?

Rumors abound about certain worldly powerful folks on the Boards of pharmaceuticals making a killing in this pandemic ; like they did during the Bird flu/Avian flu earlier . Are there any connections here?

What do we believe ? What do we discard ?

In the meanwhile, it seems that the most sensible thing to do is to avoid contact with a "T" area on the face (across the eyes, and down the nose), with anybody, and wash your hands and feet , thoroughly when you come in from outside.

Colder temperatures supposedly make these virii thrive. We are experiencing a hot non-existent monsoon this year , with drought conditions, with cities having to declare water cuts for the populations. Sanitary conditions in say Mumbai , remain unchanged. Contrast this with the drastic changes effected in Surat, Gujarat, after Plague was supposed to have made an appearance a few years ago. The entire face of Surat changed.

In the meanwhile, Mumbai's always-optimistic entrepreneurs continue to make profits in innovative ways.

A friend who travels daily to work, by suburban train to South Mumbai, mentioned seeing hawkers selling cloth masks in trains.

And you could even bargain .....

Tidal tales

If I were a tide off the coast of Mumbai, I would be mortified with the amount of hype , about my alleged activities on the three days July 24-26, 2009, after the great scare engineered by by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, hitherto referred to as MCGM. .

The MCGM, is currently burdened with a lopsided weight distribution. It tries to control things all over Mumbai, sitting at one far corner of the city, concentrating all the power with itself, as powerless officials, pretend to be locally in charge, and deal with enraged citizens. For years together, road contractors would salivate at the thought of monsoon road surfacing, where all you did was fill potholes , with more emphasis on "potholes" than "fill" . Then came the garbage and plastic age, that coincided with the illegal construction age, and old river estuaries that ran through the city to empty themselves into the sea, suddenly realized the meaning of meander, and got so heavy with trash, that nothing got emptied into the sea.

Massive monsoon flooding of July 2005 had the MCGM on the back foot.

So , this year, from early March and April, they started hyping the fact that on July 24-26 , Mumbai would be having the highest tides it had seen in the last 100 years. How big ? Close to 5.5 metres. Tables appeared in newspapers, outlining "dangerous days" in this monsoon season, when these huge tides would wash over Mumbai, at amazingly accurate times like 1:13 pm etc.

The chaos when combined with a slightly heavier monsoon rain on those days was used to create a fear in the minds of the citizenry. Schools declared holidays, Mumbai University, postponed exams, some companies worked the previous weekend and declared these days off. While ground floor residents of areas that always flood , regardless of tides, routinely shifted their belongings to neighbor's houses above, this scare forced several people into panic mode and stuff was hurriedly moved here and there.

Every few days , there would be a news item of "MCGM monsoon preparedness" in the newspapers. Pumps installed, ditches cleaned , disaster cell phone numbers displayed, fire brigade on call, extra guards deployed.

While we don't mention the fact that lots of usual inconvenient flooding happened few days earlier with normal monsoon rain, and lesser tidal heights, what was not mentioned in this Tidal Hype, was that these kind of big tides happen every year. Mostly in and around November, due to the earths planetary position.

The Port Office of Mumbai publishes tide tables which I have been checking , and tides of 4.5 metres happen all the time. They even happened last month, and possibly even last week.

Waves crashing at sea side walls and dissipating high up in the air is a routine activity at seashores where greedy folks have appropriated land , constructed walls and jutting promontories, sprinkled concrete tetra pods alongside, and built bunds. For years and years, folks have been making monsoon visits to these places to enjoy the massive waves that crash in and overflow the barricades, like boiling milk overflowing all over the stove base. There are so many pictures taken over the years, say, at the Gateway of India, opposite the Taj Mahal hotel, showing water cascading on to the road by the sea, and that was then designated as the charm of the monsoon.

It has occurred to me that this year, the MCGM may have decided to alter its approach. The smell of tar and bulldozers, and pumps, and visions of people pushing stalled cars in hip deep water , had been overdone.

And so they took the help of the Bard. The Right Honorable William Shakespeare Esq, lately of Stratford-upon-Avon, who had one of his villain characters , Brutus, say this to Julius Caesar, his king:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Despite the distinct undeniable possibility that "floods leading to a fortune" was the main incentive to some in MCGM, it is clear that the "shallows (Shakespearean for potholes) and miseries" of the monsoon continue, whether the tide is taken at the flood , or omitted. Luckily, for the harried populace , and despite the hype about tides, we are not "afloat on a full sea", and thanks to the power stations of Reliance Energy (who have recently upped their charges), it is clear that "we must take the current when it serves". And as far as the "affairs of men" go, well, we do not deign to comment.


It is now the midpoint of the danger period of 24-26 July. Normal monsoon rain has fallen since yesterday. There have even been parts of both days which were sunny and bright. I have travelled in decent dryness to two of Mumbai's far flung suburbs. We have had wonderful monsoon winds and a couple of mean showers and huge waves. People landed up in droves to experience the waves. Folks went to work as usual based on the usually inaccurate and sometimes diametrically opposite forecasts by the Met office.

The tides continue to do their stuff, whether at 3, 4 or 5 metres. While the pictures of water on the streets was nothing alarming, what really hit the nail on the head, was the picture of our city's lady mayor, standing in forlorn isolation, watching the waves crashing and breaking her seaside compound wall . Like they do every year.

The above poetic wisdom appears in the play, Julius Caesar, and was supposed to have been dispensed by Brutus, Caesar's disloyal friend, before he went to war, as he wanted to talk about Opportunity and Chance.How we need to grab it, and how it sometimes happens only once, and so on.

Lets not comment on listening to advice from folks with dicey reputations, who stab and kill their kings. And their ideas about "grabbing" opportunity. I think they followed the wrong guy in this entire tides episode. Despite the Met office saying , again and again, that heavy rains were not imminent on these days. Sometimes it is better to believe the redoubtable Met Office instead of the traitorous Brutus. Talk about listening to Goondas....


I think the MCGM just blew it.