DNA Edit: In the smoke of a diseased fog machine

In Malkangiri Odisha, 56 tribal children below the age of five have died of Japanese encephalitis. The rise in chikungunya and dengue has affected over 40,000 people across the country this year according to our Union Health Minister. The WHO has only just discovered that India has been under-reporting tuberculosis figures for 15 years now, besides having an incidence of 2.8 mn new cases, the highest in the world. And it's a pretty safe bet that none of us actually know whether Zika is in the country or not. And that's not even counting WHO's alerts on obesity, diabetes, SARS and HIV. That WHO's set a 2017 target to get countries to talk about depression is laughable for most of us. We'll talk if one on the prior list doesn't get us first.

The health plans of most civic administrations whenever epidemics rise is to pull out the trusty, rusty fog machines and quite literally, blow smoke in our eyes. Municipal hospitals will stock pills, and tests for after you have contracted it and been turned away from over-crowded private hospitals. We have no mass dissemination health care system to speak of.

The only pandemic we have truly been able to tackle on a door-to-door basis was the polio virus, and that too after it hit a peak of 500 to 1,000 children being paralysed on a daily basis in the early 1980s. Prior to that, our healthcare system consisted of, apart from NGOs that made India a pin on the map for disease tourism and charitable activities, building temples and churches to ward off the plague. We wait for the worst to hit before we find solutions to illnesses that are prone to spread rapidly through India's teeming crowds.

Reports on everything from diabetes to TB in India point the finger at a 'lack of awareness'. But a lack of awareness was the problem in polio too. We hauled in Amitabh Bachchan then too, (we still do to get people to check themselves for TB, the poor actor thus being the thread of India's eternal substitute for an actual public-health messaging system). Public Service Messaging, janhit mein jaari, is lazy messaging, that period of time between two serials when general viewers take a pee break. But with polio, understanding how vital it was, we went door to door, even when the public was afraid, reluctant, superstitious, and threatened violence. Which is why India could achieve End Game, where Pakistan has not.

'Lack of awareness' like lack of action, is no excuse. A government health plan that has been unable to defeat the mosquito for decades on end, and instead feeds it with piles of garbage, lack of sanitation and management, is just revelling in the fog.