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Message: <blockquote data-quote="imhotep" data-source="post: 29481258" data-attributes="member: 562115">In the last week of June this year, after a pregnant mother of two had died while undergoing a caesarian operation on April 2; after a female principal, admitted for a hernia operation had suffered the same sorry fate and died when given the same defective anaesthetic drug on June 15, the then Health Minister Rambukwella’s response to the allegation that these premature deaths were due to the defective anaesthetic drug was to callously tell TV reporters, ‘even when you bring down 100,000 of an FDA-approved drug, a few can turn out to be defective. That’s normal.’Minister Rambukwella’s matter-of-fact cold dismissal of these women’s deaths due to defective drugs as an inevitable risk that must be taken at state hospitals delivered a blow to the people’s confidence and stabbed deep into the unhealing raw wound of the two dead women’s families’ grief.The callous infection appeared to have spread to the medical bureaucracy as well. The Chairman of the National Medicines Regularity Authority, Professor S. D. Jayaratne, who has since been removed from his exalted post, held his own press conference following the Minister’s cussed comment on defective drug deaths.Jayaratne, the 72-year-old Professor of Medicines, statutorily responsible for ensuring that only the highest quality of medicinal drugs are imported to the island, shrugged off the charge that the Indian company was an unregistered body. “Whether registered or unregistered,” he declared, “has nothing to do with the final result.” And chuckling with complacent glee, he reminded us that death was the common fate of all mankind by referring us all to the tale of Kisa Gotami and the mustard seed, which all Buddhists know by heart. He vainly asked: ‘Can you find a single deathless house?’The SUNDAY PUNCH of JULY 23 commented: ‘Is this to be the fallback answer to excuse hence all ministerial lapses or negligence that lead to preventable deaths at governmental hospitals? That fate had stamped on every newborn’s brow, the ordained time of its exit? And that no power on earth could deny the providential will? Or bring it forward or delay exit?’.As corruption’s extent at the Health Ministry under Rambukwella’s command, slowly unfolds in Magistrate Lochani Abeywickrama’s Court, perhaps the SUNDAY PUNCH ought to add a new twist to the old Kisa Gotami story, and ask: ‘Could you have found a mustard seed then from an uncorrupt health ministry official’s home’?</blockquote>

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