In a shocking disclosure which effectively doubles the number of dengue affected patients in Dehradun, it has been found that the state health department is not counting the dengue positive cases reported by the Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya (Coronation) hospital and Gandhi Centenary Eye hospital in its record of dengue patients.
These two hospitals in Dehradun have recently started conducting the Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) tests. In these hospitals, 740 samples have so far been found positive for dengue. This figure when added to the official figure of 862 given by the health department till Thursday means that 1602 patients have so far been found positive for the disease in Dehradun alone. It is quite apparent that the health department is considering only the dengue cases reported by the laboratory of the Government Doon Medical College (GDMC) hospital.
It is worth mentioning here that after spurt in the cases of dengue in Dehradun and excessive load on the lab of the GDMC hospital, the health department started the facility of ELISA test at Coronation and Gandhi Centenary Eye hospitals.
The Chief Medical Superintendent (CMS), of Coronation and Gandhi hospitals, Dr B C Ramola informed that 400 samples each have been tested for dengue in these hospitals and out of them 372 samples were found positive for the disease at Coronation and 368 positive cases have been found at Gandhi eye hospital.
He claimed that these hospitals are sending the reports to the health department regularly. The Medical Superintendent (MS) of the GDMC hospital, Dr K K Tamta said that 7254 samples have so far been tested at the hospital out of which 862 have been found positive for the disease.
The statements of these two officials clearly indicate that the health department has goofed up on the data of the dreaded vector borne disease. When asked to comment on the issue, the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of Dehradun, Dr S K Gupta said that he would get the data examined.