State yet to confirm cause of deaths

By Our Special Correspondent

GUWAHATI, NOV. 19. Eight days after the first fatality was reported, the Assam Government still does not know whether administration of Vitamin A was responsible for the 15 deaths and hundreds of cases of sickness in children.

Senior Heatlh Department officials even do not know exactly what form of the vitamin was administered.

While Dr. S.N. Thakuria, Director of Health and Family Welfare - the department implementing the pulse vitamin programme - insists that Vitamin A administered was synthetic, Mr. P. C. Basumatary, Drugs Controller, Assam, sitting one floor above that of the Director in the same building, says it was a natural vitamin extracted from arachis oil.

He shows a paper carton of the vitamin manufactured by the Nicholas Piramal of Mahad, Maharashtra, to prove his point. ``See for yourself, nowhere is it written that it is synthetic,'' he says.

The carton also shows the vitamin is orange-flavoured, while Dr. Thakuria explains away that because the vitamin is extracted from cod and shad fish, it has a foul smell which causes nausea in children.

Samples of the drug were collected last Tuesday by the staff of the Central Drug Testing Laboratory, Kolkata, who came to Guwahati. When will he get the report? ``I will ring up Kolkata tomorrow to find out when,'' says Mr. Basumatary.

His colleague, Dr. Thakuria, tries to dismiss the whole thing as a panic reaction on the part of the parents concerned. He claims that 1.4 per cent of children usually suffer from nausea and vomitting after taking vitamin A. The symptoms appear within 24 hours and disappear in 48 hours. Therefore, he argues, cases which were reported two or three days after administration, could not be due to the vitamin.

So far, 15 deaths have been reported from seven districts: Nagaon 6, Kokrajhar 3, Karimganj 2, and one each from Cachar, Sonitpur, Nalbari and Marigaon. Of these, eight have already been found to be unrelated to Vitamin A, says Dr. Thakuria.

``The remaining seven are under investigation and we will know the cause only after we get the post-mortem and laboratory reports on viscera. Till then we cannot say vitamin A caused the deaths,'' he says. He strongly denies that the State Government ever received any directive from the Centre to stop the pulse vitamin programme.

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Section  : Other States
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