"Our health sector suffered a heavy blow in 2015. First from the devastating earthquake and now from the crippling blockade," secretary at the Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) Shanta Bahadur Shrestha, said. Several aid agencies, including the United Nation's Children Fund (UNICEF), too, have warned of catastrophic situation, with many hospitals forced to halt operations and many ailing people suffer quietly at home in lack of proper medical care. The UN agency has already warned that over three million children under five years of age are at serious risk of either death or disease.Over 1,100 health facilities incurred serious damage in the magnitude 7.9 earthquake that struck Nepal early this year. Of them, over 400, including district and central hospitals, were destroyed. Although the MoHP resumed basic health care services from makeshift structures, the situation got worse after hundreds of trucks carrying medicines from India were denied passage into Nepal by the Indian border authorities, resulting in acute shortage of drugs in the country. Scarcity of essential as well as lifesaving medicines at health facilities across the country continues even around three months after the border disruptions began. Children are being deprived of crucial vaccines and hundreds of thousands of people are compelled to suffer at home, unable to visit hospitals due to fuel shortage, another consequence of the blockade. Although there have been no official efforts to prepare data on the fall-out of the blockade and prolonged protests in the Tarai region, news of deaths attributed to them is being reported from across the country.
For years, India had been lagging behind Nepal in several health indicators like life expectancy, sanitation, child and maternal mortality rate, immunization and eradications of various other diseases. Despite the decade-long armed conflict and political instability due to prolonged transition, Nepal has already achieved various Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets that India is still struggling to meet. The World Bank social indicators, too, show Nepal much ahead of India, a country that far outstrips Nepal in terms of per capita gross domestic product (GDP). However, the brutal blockade is set to upend those achievements.
Mahendra Bahadur Shrestha, chief of Policy Planning and International Cooperation Division at the MoHP, concedes that the devastating quake followed by the chocking blockade has left the country in dire straits, threatening the success achieved through several years of rigorous efforts and billions of rupees in investments.
"If it was not for the blockade, we would have built about two-thirds of our health facilities by now," said Shrestha. He informed that in lack of raw materials, construction works of most health facilities have been halted.
"The blockade has delayed the construction works of health facilities," Shrestha said, adding that the aid agencies, which have pledged to construct those facilities, have extended the deadlines by six months. As per their original commitment with the MoHP, the construction should have been accomplished by December 15.
Shrestha hoped that the country would be able to retain all past achievements and make additional progress in 2016 in the health sector.
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