Kashmir's Battle With Sepsis

The world just marked Sepsis Day with warnings and data. The wakeup call is already here in the valley. It is alive in the cries of children, the confusion of elderly patients, and the exhaustion of doctors running against the clock.

It is sepsis, the body's brutal, uncontrolled response to infection, that tears through Kashmir's fragile health system with ruthless speed.

At Government Medical College in Srinagar, the ICU feels like a battlefield. Monitors blink relentlessly, ventilators hiss, and exhausted doctors try to hold back death. Among the patients is a two-year-old fighting dengue, a mother struggling with pneumonia, and a farmer collapsing from an untreated infection. They are faces of failure of awareness, access, and preparedness.

Sepsis moves fast, killing organs, suffocating hopes, and overwhelming families. Every hour without treatment reportedly increases the chance of death by 8 percent. Yet in Kashmir, the first defense against sepsis is missing.

A simple farmer represents this tragic reality. His fever was dismissed as seasonal flu. By the time he reached the ICU, sepsis had claimed precious hours. Treatment saved him, but the damage lingers, both in his body and in the unspoken grief of families who arrived too late.

The farmer's story is the rule in a region where public health education is treated like charity, and preventive care remains a low priority.

Vaccines for pneumonia, a leading cause of sepsis in Kashmir, remain out of reach for many. Immunization rates in rural districts continue to lag far behind national averages. Handwashing is often impossible where access to clean water is irregular.

Then there's the reckless overuse of antibiotics. Families, desperate for relief, demand pills for every cough and fever. This accelerates the spread of drug-resistant bacteria, creating a future where infections will no longer be treatable. The Antibiotic Stewardship Programme in Srinagar tries to regulate this, but its reach is limited in a system already stretched thin.

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