By IANS,
New Delhi : Swine flu doesn’t scare them. For the capital’s slum dwellers, who perennially fight flu, the new contagious virus is just another disease.
“What swine flu? We face greater problems of health and livelihood!” says Anisha, 35, a resident of south Delhi’s Rangpuri slum.
“Every third day someone in our neighbourhood is down with high fever. Stomach ailments and diarrhoea are common and so many of us women are anaemic – a flu is the last on our list of worries,” Anisha told IANS.
Her friend Majida, 28, who works as a domestic help in three households at the nearby middle class Vasant Kunj neighbourhood, says that health is the least of her worries.
“I have been running a high temperature for a week now. I keep having stomach problems. Still I go for work. I can’t afford to lose even a day’s income. We have bigger problems,” said the mother of three.
Most slum dwellers here are “uneducated”, said Anisha, a daily wager who works at construction sites.
“We don’t even know what is happening to us. We go to the mobile health vans run by NGOs and local clinics for diagnosis. They prescribe medicine which often has no effect and then we find it tough to follow up — travelling to hospitals takes up a lot of time and money.”
A walk into the cluster of slums, where the small courtyards are plastered with cow dung, considered traditional sanitisers, and drains spew stench just a few metres from the open kitchens, reveal the poor state of hygiene.
Residents in the slums often use water drawn from bore wells for drinking and washing.
Doctors say the problem is that in a bid to save fuel they don’t boil water before consumption. This, doctors say, is another reason for their recurring health problems.
“For them water-borne diseases and stomach infections are more common. With change in weather during monsoon, common cold and fever cases become rampant. We carry out preliminary tests and give them medicines. In severe cases, we refer them to the nearby government-run clinics or hospitals,” said Pradeep Bohra, a doctor with the Smile on Wheels mobile hospital van that camps in the slum once every fortnight.
Another doctor, David Singh, said: “For a swine flu test all we can do is to refer them to a testing centre. But we can’t ensure that they go there. So sometimes we give incentives – like a pain killer for a headache and when they see it works they’ll listen to us.”
At another slum, while some are a little aware about the spread of the virus, they don’t know how to tackle the situation.
“We saw the TV news that some flu is spreading. We can’t tell the difference from the common flu – what should we do?” said Chhaya, 35, a resident from Nehru Camp in south Delhi’s Govindpuri area.
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi estimates that more than three million people reside in about 1,000 unauthorized slum clusters in Delhi. Officially, 14.82 percent of Delhi’s 16 million-plus population is estimated to be below the poverty line.