Thursday, August 09, 2007

Baby to lose arm, youth freed after 6 months


Recently there are two piece of social news that caught my attention. The first one was the news of the premature baby in the Klang General Hospital. The cells in her left hand are dead due to bacteria infection and need to be amputated in order to save her life(only 50% of chance of surviving). It is due to the negligence of doctors that are not well trained. According to reports, the doctor accidentally infected the baby’s left hand’s blood vessel when he was trying to do an intravenous dip. You can get the video clips of the baby here.

This is not the first time we heard of cases of negligence of doctors especially in the general hospital(only rare cases happened in private hospitals). However not everybody can afford to get treatment from the private hospital due to the high treatment fees. Some even demand a deposit from the family before treating the patient(even in an emergency case) where the victim is involved in an accident.

“However, the hospital demanded RM10,000 for my mother’s operation but I only had RM250 with me. They made us wait an hour before transferring her to Hospital Kuala Lumpur,” he claimed. Yek died three hours after she was admitted to HKL.

The poor however has no choice but to seek treatment from general hospital, yet things like this happen. It is indeed a sad story. For those who has already lost confidence in the public hospital and could not afford private hospital, what is their remedy? Stay at home and not getting any medical treatment?

The second news is about the police(again!), where a 19 years old boy is arrested and jailed in Kajang Prison for 6 months because he is not able to produce his My Card. Is this so called crime so serious that the police need to jail him together with other heavy-weight criminals such as murderer, rapist, robber? In advanced countries, if a police requires you to produce your identity card, the police must have a very valid reason or he can be charged of violating human rights. In fact most of the advanced countries do not have such thing called “identity card”. Contrastingly, in Malaysia the police can “syok syok” ask you to produce My Card. If you fail to do so, you need to “settle” the case(they are always “thirsty”), if you don’t have any money with you, they will send you to jail!

This is our Malaysian police – not focusing on fighting the “real” crime. A young harmless boy is sent to jail while the robbers and rapist are still walking freely on the streets. How could you accuse the police of not having enough manpower to fight crime while they have the time to arrest citizens who failed to produce My Card?

We can see, the whole public system in our country has rotten to an extend that is not able to be corrected under the current policy. The government’s GIGO(garbage in garbage out) policy has caused the public to suffer for many decades. Under the current government’s policy, they take garbage into the public service(local government, hospitals, police force) and produce garbage. And they try their best to “export”(marginalize) all the talents out to countries like Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, USA. They then regard this as the 'ants attracted to sugar' failing to notice that it is their own policy that makes everything fail.

Nazri agreed with Nazrin but felt that the brain drain was not the result of a lack in a sense of belonging but of ‘money sense’. He likened the brain drain to ‘ants attracted to sugar’ and added that Malaysians ‘leave to make money but they will return. You don’t have to press the panic button yet.’

I always tell my friends that in other countries, anything associated with the government is always the best - National Universities, Government hospitals and public service. It’s exactly the opposite in Malaysia.

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