Taking a call

While swine flu spreads, the official helpline stays unhelpfully silent.

Pandemic. The Oxford English Dictionary explains it thus: “a disease prevalent over a whole country or large part of the world”. Given how it has been received, ‘pan’ could have been taken from ‘panic’.

Swine flu is a misnomer originating from laboratory tests which showed that genes in this new virus were similar to those found in pigs in North America. Scientists christened it influenza-A (H1N1) virus. The number of people infected with influenza A (H1N1) in India now stands at 73. “Of these, six are indigenous cases, who got the infection from the positive cases who travelled from abroad,” says the health ministry on its website.

1075, the official toll-free Delhi swine flu helpline number, was what I punched in. “Welcome to IDSP Alert Centre,” said a slightly stern voice, a woman’s. “Hindi mein jaankari ke liye ek dabayen. For information in English press two.” I pressed two, head abuzz with questions. The same welcome note greeted me. Perhaps I should have pressed one. I heard the same recording. So I pressed two. Silence and then the beep of a call hung up on one side.

Not one to give up easily (and with this report to file), I dialled the number again. A repeat performance from both sides — the recorded message, me alternating between one and two, and the beep. Calling from my mobile phone left me with the same experience. “Dial 011 before the number,” was a colleague’s suggestion. Still, the number failed to connect.

So I went back to 1075 from a landline. No prizes for guessing what I heard. I tried no less than five times over the next hour. No luck.

In a country as vastly populated as ours, this is indeed worrisome when a pandemic strikes. With the virus already among us, and since it is known that it spreads via human contact, the public is justifiably jittery.

Going by my experience, the health department is obviously not in the pink of health. Is this how the government allays our fears? After going to town about the initiatives it has taken and advertising the phone number, did the health department think that no one was going to call? Was I right about the panic element?

Score: 0/10. This helpline is hopeless

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