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Moment of truth has come?

Unchecked epidemic leads to a pandemic of irresponsibility

UNIAN photo

To say that situation with the spread of viral infections and the increasing number of viral pneumonia victims in western (so far) regions of Ukraine are alarming is to say nothing. Ukrainian citizens’ sentiments and behavior are affected by both a direct threat to the health and lives of thousands of people and the fact that one of the disease agents is not known. The official statement says that some cases were caused by influenza A/H1N1, the swine flu, while it remains unknown what caused the rest of cases, which prevents effective treatment.

Minister of Health Vasyl Kniazevych has already recognized that an epidemic has begun. Health care officials call on people not to panic and eat vitamins and garlic. At the same time, no explanatory work on disease prevention (or at least any general explanation of the nature of viral diseases) is being carried out. The fact that the capital’s drugstores have practically run out of gauze masks is the result of popular awareness rather than educational work of official bodies.

However, I am not speaking about purely medical issues — this is the province of experts in the field. What I am speaking about are the organizational and political questions linked with the threat of spreading of unknown epidemic across entire Ukraine. For example, patients with symptoms similar to those in Ternopil have appeared in Volyn oblast. It has turned out that Ternopil had announced quarantine in all educational establishments and sent the students home. In other words, local authorities have helped the virus to spread to other oblasts, not only the neighboring ones. Later quarantine was announced in Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. To make it efficient on a state scale, they should have made all students and pupils stay where they were.

However, to do so they should have announced a state of emergency in at least several oblasts. But isn’t it too late now? Why hasn’t the Council of National Security and Defense gathered for an extraordinary session? Why hasn’t the government demanded extraordinary measures and taken steps along this line? Should the number of fatal cases exceed several hundred for the highest echelons of power to start working properly?

I want to ask all the leaders of Ukrainian government one more question: since mid-summer Ternopil has several times stopped removing the garbage from the city and resumed it again. According to the local mass media, some parts of the city have practically turned into dumps, and there are people who live there. Isn’t the outbreak of unknown viral infection connected in some way with this factor, like the medieval plague in totally littered cities? (It is evident that not every case in the city is the swine flu.)

Medical sources asserted three days ago that the question is about viral pneumonia, an extremely dangerous disease that is difficult to treat and is caused, among other factors, by the lack of respirators in Ukraine, especially in provincial hospitals. Isn’t it time to give up false arrogance and ask other countries for help?

There is another thing that would be appropriate to mention here — patriotism. The All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda, which claims to be Ukraine’s most patriotic force, is in power in Ternopil oblast. Evidently, it is much easier to seek “non-Ukrainian forces” under one’s bed and promote the ideas of percent representation of nationalities in the government than to organize a city clean-up and garbage removal.

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