I refer to the letter NS trainees: safety, health main priorities by NS Director-General Abdul Hadi Awang Kechil and NS deaths: We know now who to blame.

I think being the leader, the director-general who has the executive power over NS camps should just own up for all the deaths and not give a technical explanation in his letter that sounds more like a ‘cut and paste’ job from an introductory note of some sort that promotes NS. He should have been more compassionate, more remorseful, more personal in his letter and cut out the rest of the nonsense.

For example, the director said, ‘The trainees will be provided with the highest medical attention and diagnosed for levels of their illness ... Currently, each camp has a Medical Unit that comprises three Medical Assistants and two training nurses to accommodate the various health issues of the trainees’.

Come on, after working for years in an emergency department, I have seen referral letters written by paramedics, referring cases with simple diagnosis. We know they are not doctors, and we don’t expect them to write a diagnosis like a doctor. But that’s why precisely they refer the cases they are not sure about to doctors. Unlike the NS camp paramedics who keep the victims in the camp until it is too late to revert the illness.

Maybe you can fool the non-medical public by your ‘explanation’ but one reading of the news in the papers and we medical professionals can already guess that there is some sort of fishy thing going on.

For example, toxic megacolon (as the post-mortem diagnosis says so) should not have suddenly happened just like that out of the blue. The paramedic in charge might have missed the early red flags that point to a serious illness. Why should a victim die of constipation?

I suspect it is the fault of the paramedics in charge who did not refer the trainee earlier to the hospital. Just because he or she didn't know what's happening to student Too Hui Min does not give him or her the license to simply label the student as having constipation.

Rather than seeing the non-bowel opening as a warning sign of something sinister, he made the wrong diagnosis of keeping her in the NS camp further and worse still, gave her a pill (which I suspect was hyosine or something of an equivalent) and that could have made her condition worse. If he is not qualified to make a decision like a doctor, at least he should refer her to a doctor.

Another case (it sounds quite ridiculous) is for a victim to die like at the NS Kem Semanggol camp with a simple cause of ‘unknown fever’. The public should be given a fuller explanation. Why should a student die of fever without it being fully investigated?

Let me say this to the NS DG - my heart really goes out in tears to those who have entrusted their children into the hands of you people and for what? Only to bring back dead bodies.

Let me put throw this scenario back to those in the NS camps - if I, as a doctor, diagnose your son/daughter as a simple diagnosis of constipation and send him/her back will some pills, giving my fake explanation that everything will be fine and okay; and few days later, your son/daughter comes back to the emergency department with a bloated abdomen, appears very sickly and died in the emergency department itself, would you want to sue me?