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Dengue Fever Overwhelms New Delhi Hospitals
NEW DELHI, Oct. 3 : The Indian government called an emergency meeting of health officials today Tuesday to try to control an outbreak of dengue fever that has infected about 500 people in northern India, overwhelming Delhi’s hospitals and exposing serious flaws in the public health system.
Delhi authorities were spraying high-risk areas with insecticide to kill the mosquitoes that carry the disease, but as the death toll rose to 14, doctors associations criticized the government for a belated and ineffective response.
There was chaos at Delhi’s leading public hospital, the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where doctors were forced to turn away suspected dengue cases because of a scarcity of beds and blood. People were being treated in corridors and in tents erected outside the building, and television reporters filming undercover within the building said the shortage of doctors on the dengue wards was so acute that patients were helping administer intravenous saline drips to each other.
The hospital was itself struggling to contain an outbreak of the disease, attributed to mosquitoes breeding in stagnant pools of water on the surrounding campus. One doctor died last week from the fever, and 19 medical students and staff members have fallen ill.
The inability of the government to cope with what is a relatively routine, annual phenomenon throws into harsh relief the crisis within India’s medical system, illustrating how ill-equipped it is to meet basic public health needs.