An ailing Ram Binod Tiwari at home. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

Calcutta, Nov. 1: A malignant malaria patient has been without proper treatment since being refused admission by a city hospital, where a neighbour from the same slum today died of the killer disease now sweeping Calcutta.

Chauffeur Ram Binod Tiwari, 37, has been severely ill since being turned away from Shambhunath Pandit Hospital on Wednesday, his wife Gauri said at their New Alipore shanty.

“The medicine prescribed by the hospital is too expensive. My husband is continuing with the cheaper medicine he had been taking, prescribed by a local doctor,” she added.

A hospital official said there weren’t enough beds. “The patient was not critical. The doctors prescribed some preliminary medicines.”

On Thursday, Dukhi Paswan, from the ward 81 slum, was admitted to the same hospital with malignant malaria. The 70-year-old died today, becoming the eighth victim of the disease in Calcutta since September.

Scores are down with malaria or undiagnosed fever in the New Alipore neighbourhood at a time mosquito-borne diseases — malaria, dengue, chikungunya and various kinds of encephalitis — have besieged the city, killing 18 in two months (see chart).

Open manholes and puddles of water dotted the slum area but residents said the civic authorities had done nothing to check mosquito breeding apart from sprinkling bleaching powder mixed with larvicide.

The state government’s message appeared to be: there is no reason for panic, infections are spreading globally anyway, and it’s the Centre’s responsibility to battle diseases.

“There is no reason for panic at this moment. Vector-borne diseases have killed more people this year because of the recent untimely rain and delayed winter,” health minister Surjya Kanta Mishra told a physicians’ conference.

Mishra said the Centre should pass a public health act for better management of diseases so they don’t spread from one state to another. He said the city patient killed by Japanese encephalitis may have caught the virus in Siliguri, which, however, happens to be in Bengal.

He then did some semantics, saying: “It is not an epidemic, it can be called a pandemic because over 2.5 crore people have been affected by dengue throughout the world.”

An epidemic is a sharp rise in incidence in one particular area; a pandemic is an epidemic spreading across a continent or the whole planet, such as Sars a few years ago.

Junior Union health minister P. Lakshmi, who was in the city today, said: “Bengal ranks among the top states as far as vector-borne diseases are concerned.” She said the Centre would soon implement the public health act.

Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya blamed the patients’ lack of awareness for the high number of deaths. “Those who died did not show up at health clinics in the initial stages of fever. By the time they went to hospitals, the situation was out of control.”

Paswan was taken to hospital after two days of “high temperature, headache and joint pain”, his son Kishan, a chauffeur, said.

Kishan’s son Kaushal, 5, and daughter Priyanka, 7, too are down with malaria but not of the malignant variety