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Urban health

The news that some of the country's most prestigious secondary schools, including elite state schools, have been blacklisted as dengue-risk zones has alarming implications. If these, relatively well-equipped and resource-rich institutions have not been able to maintain generally healthy environments, how could the vast majority of schools in the country that are poorly staffed, poorly equipped and financially weak do so?

But the tale of neglect, inefficient maintenance and what may amount to be criminal levels of uncleanliness does not end with schools. A large number of other institutions, installations and properties have been identified by the municipal authorities as being environments that nurture death-dealing mosquito-borne diseases.

With the death toll from dengue now rising, the municipal authorities themselves, seem to have woken up from their own stupor. Our lead news report on Page 1 discloses that the no less than 40 court cases have been filed and more than 350 warning notices issued against institutions and individuals whose properties have been deemed to have failed to meet municipal standards of health.

But citizens may rightly ask: why did the authorities wait until 18 people have died from dengue before taking action?

Dengue, although not an entirely new phenomenon in this country, has assumed epidemic proportions only in recent times. Its intensification today runs a dramatic parallel to the intensification of largely un-planned urbanisation and the expansion of urban populations in recent decades. Rapid urban industrialisation also has contributed to the general degradation of our habitats.

The failure of urban authorities to enforce a reasonable standard of health in housing and in the general urban environs must also be seen as a contributory factor to the current epidemic.

While today's punitive action by the authorities is most welcome and we hope that it will be sustained, what is required in the long term is the continuous enforcement of minimum urban planning standards that conform to our population's health needs. These minimum standards must include a public health and sanitation awareness.

Criminal defamation

The gloves are off. Sri Lanka's rapidly growing media industry has won for itself the capacity to write more 'freely' about things. The repeal of the criminal defamation laws has removed a major constraint on media reportage.

While the media industry may now feel free to expose the seamier side of life and society, at the same time the Sri Lankan media must also meet the people's expectations and aspirations.

The Editor's Guild has done well to formulate a code of ethics that journalists could and should follow. At the same time, the media industry plans the establishment of a Press Complaints Commission.

The biggest challenge however, is to resist the pecuniary compulsions of the industry and its market in the process of packaging the 'news' product. The demands of intense competition between media enterprises and between media professionals themselves result in the substance of news being fine-tuned to market considerations rather than to the social and personal needs of audiences. It is then that a lack of restraint could result in the vigorous exploitation of information about people in a manner that risks harming the status and reputation of people.

In the new legal environment it is up to individual citizens to take up issues of defamation and not many Sri Lankan citizens have the capacity to take on giant media enterprises in civil law suits.

Freed of the shackles of the criminal defamation laws, the media industry must now solely bear the responsibility of protecting the rights of the people and social groups it reports about.

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