By A.A.M.Nizam, MATARA

Influential Indians living in overseas countries, acting as Ambassadors of their country, project to wealthy people in those overseas countries that India has the best medical facilities and medical staff available in the world and encourages people sufferings from various ailments to visit India and get treatment there for their ailments.

For instance in the wealthy Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates etc., this false propaganda has been very successful since a large proportion of Doctors, Nurses and hospital servants are from India and they make every effort to recommend the wealthy patients to obtain treatment or follow up treatment in Indian hospitals.  In the United Arab Emirates an Indian national named Dr. Shetty owns and operates a chain of hospitals and medical centres in all the Emirates of the U.A.E and they are considered as the best medical centres of that country.  All medicines prescribed and medicinal equipment used in these hospital and medical centres are only of those manufactured in India

Kerala State of India is the native place of this Dr. Shetty. He has a chain of hospitals in India centred in Bangalore, Chennai and almost all major cities of the Kerala States. These hospitals get adequate patronage from the U.A.E. patients alone.

On the contrary, the wealthy Indians do not trust the credibility of the health services available in Indian hospitals, whether it is government or private, and the film personalities and other prominent individuals proceed to hospitals in Singapore and Malaysia to get treatment even for a minor ailment. Mount Elizabeth Hospital, in Singapore, is a hospital very much famous for Indians.  In the same manner, hospitals in Sri Lanka have become reputed among them for getting transplant of kidneys and other body parts and also at a reasonable cost.

Sri Lanka has a credible record as regards its health services and it provides free universal healthcare and it scores higher than the regional average in healthcare having a higher Life expectancy and a lower Maternal and Infant deaths than its neighbors, including India. It is known for having one of the world’s earliest known Healthcare systems and has its own Ayurvedic Medicine system.

The Ministry of Health and its arrogant Minister who thinks that he is omniscient and was waiting for an opportunity to discredit and punish our health services personnel, since they did not bow down to his dictates, has blindly swallowed the well planned Indian bait to discredit our doctors.

As per the latest reports pertaining to the health sector the Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) claims that the government has lent credence to a non-existing human organ racket here and deprived the country of foreign exchange by imposing an ill-conceived, blanket ban on kidney transplant operations on foreigners in Sri Lanka.

GMOA Secretary Dr. Nalinda Herath claims that the end result of the government ban served the purposes of Indian doctors and medical industry to block a large number of Indians coming here for kidney transplant operations.

He says the ban was the result of a well-orchestrated media campaign carried out in India against the Sri Lankan doctors, and Kidney transplant operations had attracted many Indians to come to Sri Lanka for such operations and obviated the need for the Sri Lankan kidney patients to go to India.

GMOA also claims that the biggest harm was done by the Indian media by cooking up a story of a kidney racket in Sri Lanka and it is unfortunate that a section of our media, too, fell to the trap laid by Indians by repeating those stories.

The GMOA also emphatically points out that the donor has to be healthy and the process of kidney transplant is much more sensitive and complex, compared to the normal medical treatment, and adds that all transplant operations conducted in Sri Lanka is beimg done only after the approval of an Ethical Review Committee comprising of judicial medical officers, physicians, surgeons, non medical legal experts and other respectable citizens. Thereafter the approval of the Director General of Health Services has to be obtained and all kidney transplants conducted in Sri Lanka has been performed in accordance with the provisions of the Human Tissue Act No 48 of 1987.

They said that in India the situation is different and actually organ rackets happen there. They pointed out that sometimes as it has been showed in many Indian films, they kidnap the persons and their organs are forcibly removed. It is no wonder that Sri Lankan organ transplanting industry was gaining in the region due to India’s bad reputation and our doctors are actually promoting health tourism. What the government’s ban has done is to back a conspiracy hatched by the Indians.

The GMOA also points out that it is so unfortunate that our authorities acted without conducting investigations on India purported and malicious allegations and now our patients would have two options if they are diagnosed with kidney problems.  That is they could make up their mind to die of the ailment or go abroad to India and undergo substandard treatment at an enormous cost.