With four deaths already, dengue has turned into a health scare for denizens. However, the public and private health sectors are at odds over diagnosis of the viral disease, casting a shadow on the disease’s impact on Telangana.
According to a State government’s report, around 211 cases of dengue were confirmed until end of July. That number is predominantly from government health institutions across 10 districts of the State, as not all private hospitals are reporting cases, either confirmed or suspicious.
This implies the actual number of infections could be much higher than what is being reported by the State.
In Hyderabad, for instance, the government claims around 77 cases were reported until the end of July this year. Contrastingly, one of the corporate hospital chains alone treated 60 people for dengue in July, the hospital’s sources informed. A couple of other large private hospitals too revealed treating at least a dozen patients in the last two months, which takes the count to numbers higher than what the State claims for Hyderabad.
“Not all private hospitals report data on suspicious cases which have to be confirmed by the Institute of Preventive Medicine (IPM). Only confirmed serum-positive cases of dengue can be counted,” a public health official said, not discounting the fact that a lot of genuine dengue infections go unreported.
The disagreement is due also to practices of testing. The IPM administers what are broadly known as ‘assay tests’, while most private institutions employ a rapid blood testing kit called the NS 1 antigen test which can detect the virus in acute infections as early as the first day of symptoms.
Private health practitioners confide that many doctors treat patients as dengue-affected by infusing platelets, which is a classical symptom of the disease but not exclusive to it.
“A rapid test may yield positive result, but it is not a qualitative indication of infection and has to be confirmed by other tests to be called a dengue infection with classical symptoms, including acute respiratory distress,” a private doctor, who works in close coordination with the State government, said. He suggested the actual number of dengue cases in the State would be greatly exaggerated if inputs of all private hospitals were considered.
Unperturbed by the State and private health institutions disagreement over what constitutes a dengue infection, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) claims it has stepped up its anti-larval operations in the city.
“Every time we receive word of an infection either from State or private institutions, we carry out fogging and fumigation in the area and in 50 houses around where a person was infected,” said GHMC chief entomologist V. Venkatesh.
