Unable to control the rising number of dengue cases in the city, the Medical Health department has retorted to jugglery of data to reduce the number of dengue patients. The department officials who till Thursday were putting the number of dengue patients this year at 95 have now revised the figure to 67.
It appears that the beleaguered senior health department officers hit upon an ingenious idea of revising the list of dengue patients as they were facing severe criticism for the failing to control the spread of disease. On the question of overnight decrease in number of dengue cases, Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of Dehradun Dr SP Agarwal explained that some of cases which were included in the list of patients were removed as Enzyme linked Immunosorbent Assay (ElISA) was not performed on them.
He said that as per the norm only ElISA test is considered as confirmatory test and it was found out that some cases which were found positive in the Rapid test were also included in the list of dengue patients. Dr Agarwal further added, “The department would consider only those ElISA positive cases which are done in laboratory of Doon hospital or Himalayan Institute and Hospital Trust (HIHT) Jollygrant.” Dr Agarwal said that dengue cases in the district are not fatal and platelets had to be administered on only 11 dengue patients this year.
The district nodal officer for dengue Dr DK Chakrapani claimed that the dengue cases this year are much less than last year. He said that health department teams took a proactive approach to curb the menace of dengue this year; these teams did door to door surveys in the affected areas and ensured that the breeding grounds of Tiger Mosquito are destroyed. Dr Chakrapani said that community participation is needed to control diseases like dengue. Dengue is a viral infection spread by the mosquito Aedes Aezypti (Tiger Mosquito). The symptoms of the disease are persistent high fever, rashes, headache and pain in the joints. In the acute cases the platelets number in blood decrease drastically which may prove fatal for the patient.
The health department teams organised a health camp in the worst-affected Bhagat Singh Colony area on Friday. The samples of 18 people were collected in this camp. It is worth mentioning here that 40 dengue cases are reported from Bhagat Singh Colony this time. The Municipal Corporation has started cleanliness drive in the colony and intensive fogging is undertaken in the lanes of the colony.