People die directly of dengue. The two died on Tuesday.
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The Delhi government has asked hospitals to ensure that dengue and chikungunya patients are treated without distress.
Nadda said that 11 advisories have been issued to all states and they have been requested to declare dengue as a notifiable disease.
Delhi’s Health Minister, Satyendra Jain, has reiterated that Chikungunya can not cause deaths, and added that this is a fact that is available on Google, and not his opinion. “Looking at this, the state government has chose to cancel leave of doctors and ban transfer of doctors at least till October 14”, a state medical and health department official told IANS on Thursday.
Speaking to the media, Jain said that Delhiites need not panic and that all they needed to do is to take precautions and go to the hospital only if they experience symptoms of the vector-borne disease.
With increasing cases of Chikungunya- Dengue and the kind of negative reaction on the tourists, the traffic is set to drop drastically, leaving a bruising impact on businesses such as hotels, airlines, taxi operators, restaurants etc.
“Nadda ji (Union Health Minister J P Nadda) told me no one died of chikungunya in the entire country. There was a need to carry out fogging in the whole of Delhi”.
“Surveillance for dengue and chikungunya in India presently captures only those patients that are laboratory confirmed at government identified sentinel hospitals, most of these are in the public sector”. In emergencies, people have come together and fought. “That is what is required now”, he said.
Hospitals in Delhi are with either the central government or the BJP-held municipal corporations or the AAP-led Delhi government.
According to the hospital, the patient was also suffering from chronic myeloid monocytic leukemia and had tested positive for chikungunya by rapid PCR test.
More than 1,150 cases of dengue, spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and 21 cases of Malaria, too, have been reported this year till now. He was the fifth chikungunya patient to have lost life at the hospital in the last four days.
A 54-year-old man from Uttar Pradesh who had tested positive for chikungunya and was suffering from a host of other diseases died in AIIMS due to multi-organ failure, the hospital confirmed Thursday.
“It’s all about the immunity level”.
“By and large the message is very clear that Chikungunya is not a very fatal disease, people should not get frightened”. The government claimed things were “under control” although there was panic among patients.
“Given that substantial population visits the private sector for seeking healthcare in India, It is important that information from private hospitals and facilities is captured and well-represented for better understanding and estimation of the national disease burden of these infections”, it said.
The latest deaths included that of Deputy Director of the Social Welfare Department M.P. Singh, who passed away at the Sanjay Gandhi Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences on Wednesday.
Experts also feel that north Indians could be succumbing to the vector-borne disease due to their “low immunity” to it.
In 1996, a severe outbreak of dengue had occurred in Delhi when about 10,252 cases and 423 deaths were reported. “In West Bengal, cases of malaria have been reported”, Nadda said.
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On August 31, a 25-year-old man died of dengue at Apollo Hospital.
