Jalandhar, June 30
In response to the news report published in Jalandhar Tribune on Sunday regarding the lapse by the Health Department in serving food to drug addict patients without checking its quality, a team of food safety officers, working under the Health Department, today visited the de-addiction camp at the ESI hospital and took two samples of the food served to the patients.
The department has now sent these for testing to the State Health Laboratory in Chandigarh. The inspection was conducted after the department received directions from Husn Lal, Managing Director, Punjab Health Systems Corporation (PHSC), who, after going through the news report, expressed shock over the issue.
“I was not aware that the food is being supplied by some unauthorised contractor. I have directed the district Health Department to test the quality of food and to also check toxicants, if any, at the earliest. I have also directed them to issue a receipt for any money being charged from the patients either as meal or file expenses,” said Husn Lal.
When asked about the logic behind charging a whopping Rs 2,500 as meal expenses from extremely poor families of drug addicts, he replied that since such patients required special diet as prescribed by their doctors, the meal expenses had to be borne by the patient himself.
Although the Health Department received directions to inspect the quality of food in the morning itself, due to reasons best known to them, it could only dispatch its team of food safety officers by evening. “We had visited the de-addiction ward and took samples of ‘bhindi’ and ‘dal’ from the food given to the patients. The food is indeed being provided by a local contractor who was not holding any licence under the Food Safety and Standards Act 2006,” revealed Dr Harjot Singh, Food Safety Officer. He also said that during the inspection, the families had complained about the poor quality of food being served to them by the Health Department.
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