Bengal's health department confirmed 132 new cases of dengue on Wednesday even as the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) buried its head in the sand and sought to scale down the threat.
The civic body, which conducted an inspection of the Industrial Training Institute in Gariahat and apparently found Aedes aegypti larvae swimming in stagnant water there, refused to accept that the official statistics were a reflection of its feeble dengue-prevention campaign in the city.
"We have kept the outbreak under control. Whenever a new case has been detected in a particular locality, we have kept the disease from spreading further," said Atin Ghosh, mayoral council member of the CMC's health wing.
The cases reported on Wednesday - many of them in the city - took the official count since January to 1,874. The death toll in the current outbreak stands at 15. Most of the victims were from Calcutta and its surrounding areas.
South Calcutta's first victim since June, Class II student Rai Saha, died at Ruby General Hospital on Tuesday afternoon. She was a resident of Ballygunge Station Road.
Some of the city's top private hospitals reported that the number of dengue patients had doubled over the past week. "The spurt in dengue noticed since last month is continuing and patients are getting admitted every day," said Rupali Basu, president and CEO (eastern region) of Apollo Gleneagles Hospitals.
At Peerless Hospital, 15 patients were admitted with dengue on Wednesday. The figure was six about a week ago, said a hospital official.
Belle Vue Clinic had 18 dengue patients and 12 others with fever whose cause hadn't been confirmed. The number is more than double of the dengue-related admissions last week. Health department officials corroborated reports that dengue infections within Calcutta had spiralled.
Public health experts said the municipalities needed to go all out against the dengue-causing Aedes aegypti mosquito to avert a crisis. "There are two components: prevention and treatment. Prevention is more important in dengue," said an official of the state health department.
The CMC, which continued its inspection of campuses of educational institutes, admitted that ITI, Gariahat, was a dengue time bomb ticking away.
"The situation there was worse than any other campus I have visited. I found containers with Aedes aegypti larvae swimming in rainwater. There were potential breeding places of mosquitoes on the rooftops and elsewhere on the campus," said mayoral council member Ghosh.
The ITI authorities blamed the public works department for mosquitoes breeding on the campus.
"We don't believe in playing the blame game, but the PWD is renovating parts of the campus and has dumped garbage, plastic and other containers in the areas where the CMC team found mosquito larvae," said K.L. Roy, deputy director of the institute.
School reopens
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan on Wednesday reopened for classes XI and XII on Wednesday after eight days. Classes for Prep I to X will resume on August 16. The school had been shut since August 2 because of the parents' agitation over the death of two students from dengue-related complications.
