Our Correspondent
JHENIDAH, Dec 30: Severe cold, fog and cloudy sky have disrupted normal life across Jhenidah district for the last two days.
There has been almost no peeping of the sun and the sky remained cloudy making the situation worse. The normal life is nearly paralysed here.
Cold-related diseases like asthma, pneumonia, coughing, bronchitis and diarrhoea have increased alarmingly generating worries among the family members of the patients.
Hospital and clinic sources from the district town and different upazila headquarters said patients with cold-related diseases are crowding the health centres.
The sufferings of the low-income people, including the day-labourers, coolies, rickshaw-pullers, van-pullers, easy-bike drivers and wood-choppers are getting worse. Their lives have been badly affected by the gloomy adverse weather. They cannot keep themselves confined in their rooms. Under the necessity, they are forced to come out. However, due to lack of employment, they cannot earn their essential livelihood.
The homeless wretched men and women who are to lie on footpaths at night in the district are the worst sufferers. They cannot procure two square meals let alone warm clothes to be protected from shivering cold.
Motaleb Hossain, a day-labourer in Jhenidah town said, "We are bound to come out for livelihood because nobody will help us."
Streams of people - both male and female - are overcrowding secondhand clothes stalls and warm-clothes markets on the footpaths of Jhenidah town and six upazilas and other haats and bazars throughout the district to collect winter clothes in order to protect them from the bone-chilling cold.
Rabiul Islam (55), a secondhand clothes seller at Modhu Bazar in Kaligonj told the FE that the number of makeshift clothes stalls had increased to over 80 whereas only 5-6 shops were selling old clothes even some days ago here.
Cold-related diseases have broken out among the cattle-heads like cows and goats too.
There are some organisations in the district, but they are very scanty in number. The mostly affected cold-stricken impoverished people in the district requested the affluent ones in the society to come forward with their helping hands to ease the miseries.
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