With rabies, avoid stray dogs; with malaria, avoid all Indians
Sunday, April 17, 2016
No one has the foggiest as to what the Economic and Technology Cooperation Agreement (ETCA) to be signed by Sri Lanka and India really is for the simple reason that no details as to its exact terms and clauses have so far been revealed.
But this has been no impediment for the Government doctors union, the GMOA, from launching a no-holds-barred campaign against its signing and subsequent implementation based on what has trickled down the grapevine. The possibility raised by some that Indians will be allowed to enter the Lanka job market has sent the doctors’ union up the gum tree, like it has done no other professional body.
GMOA General Secretary Dr Nalinda Herath addressing Monday's news conference
Fearing an Indian medical invasion by an army of Indian doctors will commandeer Lankan doctors’ employment, the GMOA has raised the red flag and threatened to launch nationwide strikes if ETCA is implemented, the same tactic they adopted to protest against the Government’s decision to withdraw the vehicle permit for doctors recently. More and more the GMOA has shown all the signs of turning from a professional body into a ragamuffin group of political activists whose sole interest had been to further their financial benefits.
They have abandoned their duty to demand of the Government better medical facilities for their patients, to fight for sufficient drugs to be available at government hospitals and at the Maharagama Cancer hospital, to call for better monitoring of the activities of private hospitals and private teaching hospitals and to act to advance the cause of their patients. Instead they have taken patients hostage and held their lives to ransom to win demands for themselves. In their quest to fill their coffers, they have had no qualms in using patients to fill coffins, if need be.
But now their anti-ETCA protest has taken a bizarre turn and shown that, in the depths to which they have sunk to achieve their aims, they have found a deeper still to stoop. The GMOA General Secretary Dr Nalinda Herath has thought it fit to pounce on an isolated case of an Indian national working in a construction site in Nuwara Eliya who has contracted malaria in the first week of this month and to hold his illness as a warning to the Lankan public as to what will happen if the ETCA agreement goes ahead and opens the floodgates for Indian doctors to come to Lanka and work here on a long term basis.
On Monday, the GMOA General Secretary held a media conference. The subject that hung heavy on his mind was this Indian who had taken ill. His concern, however, was not how the patient was faring and what steps have been taken to alleviate his medical condition or how he had come to acquire the mosquito borne disease. His motive was pure and simple: to use this case as evidence to brand a billion Indians as foul disease carriers who should not be touched with a barge pole. His aim was to cause widespread alarm amongst the public that if ETCA is signed by the Lankan Government, the nation will be embroiled in a malarial epidemic again.
“After 2012 there have been no cases of malaria been contracted in Lanka,” the GMOA’s Secretary Dr. Herath declared at the media conference. “But there have been cases where locals returning from Africa or India with malaria. There have also been cases where Indian tourists and other foreigners have come to Lanka with malaria. This case is one such instance. But in this case there is a difference. Though this man had come on a tourist visa he had not come to tour the land. For several months he had been working as a carpenter in Nuwara Eliya. This must not be taken lightly. Merely because malaria is not there today in Lanka if we allow people to come from epidemic ridden countries and allow them to stay here freely, then once more there will be a malaria epidemic in this country.