Unheeded Signposts

''EPIDEMICS are like the large signposts from which a statesman of stature can read that a disturbance has occurred in the development of his nation, which not even careless politics can afford to overlook", wrote Rudolf Virchow, the German physician-scientist-statesman and father of social medicine, in 1848. The plague deaths in Surat and the adjoining areas and the cases in Beed are a vivid and emphatic signpost of the breakdown of public services in this country.