Central government to blame for diseases: Uttar Pradesh minister

Lucknow, Sep 16: Uttar Pradesh Health Minister Anant Kumar Misra Tuesday blamed the central government for the various diseases threatening to take on an epidemic proportion in the state.

He sought to blame the central government not only for the “inadequate supply”, but also “substandard” and “delayed” supply of the required vaccines for preventing diseases like Japanese Encephalitis, viral encephalitis, malaria as well other vector borne diseases.

The minister, a cousin of the all powerful Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) national general secretary Satish Chandra Misra, also accused the government of “failure to maintain the cold chain for storage of various vaccines in the state".

He admitted that there were as many as 234 deaths on account of the spread of “acute encephalitis in Gorakhpur, Basti, Maharajganj, Siddharthnagar, Sant Kabir Nagar, Kushinagar, Bahraich spread across eastern Uttar Pradesh"". According to him, “we have detected about 1,364 cases of acute encephalitis in these districts so far.”

Addressing a press conference here Tuesday, Misra said, “not only has UP been deprived of the required quantity of vaccines needed by the state to tackle the diseases, but it had failed to make arrangements for the necessary cold chain desired for storage of all vaccines.”

According to Misra, “ignoring our additional demand for one million JE vaccines, the centre provided us with just about 460,000, leaving a huge gap that was responsible for spread of the diseases in about seven districts of eastern UP.”

Later while admitting that the state had “received about 19 million vaccines”, he claimed that “as many as 450,000 of these were substandard and could not be used".