Winter, Air Pollution, Disease

By E.OYUNDARI

The three words winter, air pollution, and flu have become an inseparable part of daily conversation for Ulaanbaatar dwellers. You take a cab and you hear the taxi driver's story of worry about his child's or grandchild's cough and cold. You come to your office and you hear your colleagues discussing what medicines and home remedies are currently effective against an ongoing, terrible cough.

Children who attend kindergartens and daycares are almost on cold medication constantly. It seems like we are feeding our children more medicine than food. There is no child who is brought up withoutcatching a cold. When we were children, I remember we used to be cured really fast and used to get sick less often than children do nowadays. Today, coldsreappear a week after one is cured, complications develop really quickly, resulting in no option but to have symptoms treated at local hospitals, which suggests that children's health issues have reached a disastrous level.

The most significant age for a child to grow up healthy is between the ages of zero to six. During this period, the intellectual, psychological, and physical development of a child is occuring. Pediatricians warn that getting sick frequently and the weakening of a child's immune system during such an important time can become a factor in children developing chronic diseases. Parents try to go to the countryside with fresher air and play with their children outdoors during the summer to enhance their child's immune system, however, it seems this tradition no longer can protect children from cold viruses.

The cost of cold care

Children getting sick directly influences a household's finances. For instance, one of my acquaintances, who has two children, visits the local pediatrician constantly during the winter. Once, both children were hospitalized for pneumonia. Parents stay for weeks in local hospitals, caring for their children in shifts. Immune support medicines and antivirals like Anaferon, Baby Col Col, Nurofen, ibuprofen, paracetamol, Immunal, and Viferon are regularly consumed by our children. The price of each medication starts at 5,000 MNT. Antibiotic syrups cost over 12,000 MNT. Parents spend 30,000 to 50,000 MNT minimum for one-time injections.

My friend's children can catch the flu a couple times a month, and they spend at least 200,000 MNT each month to heal their children, buying the best and most optimal medicine. They can't visit health centers everyday to...