On August 12, when schoolteacher Roopa Chand became the first person in Bangalore to die of swine flu, the print and electronic media noted that
Karnataka health minister B Sriramulu was camping in Bellary to campaign for the by-elections.
However, the minister’s steadfast principal secretary I R Perumal told journalists that Mr Sriramulu was remote-controlling all measures being taken to combat the virus. Almost as if to make up for lost time, the minister has been holding regular press briefings over the last few days in Bangalore where he has been advising the public not to panic since he had “directed health officials not to take any chances on the issue and the government had initiated measures on a war-footing”.
And all this even while one of the city’s main testing centres closed at 4 pm every day since it did not have enough testing kits. By August 19, the death-toll in India’s Silicon Valley had risen to seven and there were two instances of the test-report being submitted after the patient had expired.
On August 18, minister Sriramulu took a literally hands-on approach to the H1N1 crisis, perhaps to make the point that he was not a modern-day Nero, as his critics had claimed. An official press release, issued on August 18, proudly states in a rather long headline, ‘Health Minister Sriramulu visits H1N1 patients in five Bangalore hospitals, refuses to wear surgical mask, mingles with patients, boosts their morale’.
The text of the release adds that the doctors had advised Mr Sriramulu to wear a surgical mask before entering the isolation wards but that the minister had politely refused since “he had come to dispel the unnecessary scare over the disease”.
The Karnataka health minister is now one-up on his Maharashtra counterpart who, just the other day, visited the Nagpur zoo along with his gunman and patted a tiger cub in its cage. Hopefully, the H1N1 virus which is presently stalking Bangalore will be suitably scared by the ministerial bravado!
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