Valley hospitals facing shortage of oxygen

The daily load-shedding coupled with unavailability of diesel in the country is now taking its toll on the health sector also as hospitals operating in the valley are facing severe dearth of oxygen owing to it.

"We are facing difficulty in supplying the required amount of oxygen to the valley hospitals due to unavailability of diesel," Shanker Agrawal, who owns a oxygen manufacturing plant told Kantipur daily. "On one hand, there is regular power cuts and on the other hand there is not even enough diesel to operate generators to manufacture oxygen."

Agrawal's company supplies about five hundred oxygen cylinders to hospitals in the valley every day. According to an independent estimate, hospitals and health institutions inside the valley use up some 650 oxygen gas cylinders in a day.

Agrawal warned that if the government doesn't avail diesel, then his company won't be able to supply oxygen to valley's hospital from Sunday. His manufacturing plant barely managed to put out around two hundred oxygen cylinders on Saturday because of which, he said, the health institutions in the valley would be supplied with only half of the necessary amount of oxygen they need.

The company needs 400 liters of diesel every day for manufacturing 500 cylinders of oxygen. nepalnews.com ag Feb 17 08