India disease officials 'failing'

One NGO says the situation is "very, very grim"

India's health minister has accused his own officials of failing to prevent diseases such as Japanese encephalitis.

The official death toll in the recent outbreak in northern India has hit 608 although one NGO says as many as 1,500 children could be dead.

Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said "there should not even be one case".

The mosquito-borne Japanese encephalitis has struck Bihar and also Uttar Pradesh, where it has killed at least 8,000 people since 1978.

Vaccines

Mr Ramadoss said it was the government's responsibility to eradicate epidemics of disease.

The government is under pressure to fudge figures Shalini Raman, Voluntary Health Association

He was launching a rural health programme in Uttar Pradesh's capital, Lucknow, that will include a massive immunisation programme.

Mr Ramadoss said every year health ministry officials counted the number of deaths of different diseases in India and termed them as common.

"This is not the way we should go and there should not be even one case," he said.

The minister said it was unfortunate India was unable to produce enough vaccines for Japanese encephalitis.

Presently, a laboratory in the northern hill town of Kasauli produces about half a million vaccines.

Mr Ramadoss said his ministry was now trying to procure a new tissue-culture based vaccine produced by China and South Korea.

Dengue fever

Officials told the BBC that many field officers were not accurately reporting the Japanese encephalitis death toll in their areas for fear of being punished for failing to take sufficient action to stop the spread of the disease.

Sonia Gandhi visited encephalitis sufferers on Monday

Health workers in Uttar Pradesh say there was a lack of early preventive action to save lives and also contested casualty figures.

Shalini Raman, a member of the private health NGO, the Voluntary Health Association, told the AFP news agency: "We're collecting figures from various agencies in the field and our estimate is between 1,000 and 1,500 children are dead."

Ms Raman said there was an urgent need to spray insecticide to rid overcrowded slums of mosquitoes.

"The situation is very, very grim... the government is under pressure to fudge figures, but one just has to step out to places like Gorakhpur to see the real picture."

Meanwhile, an outbreak of dengue fever has claimed 15 lives in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

"The situation is tough. Fifteen people have died and almost 900 are suffering from dengue," Prabhakar Chatterjee, the state's chief health officer, told Reuters.