Shahira Naim
Tribune News Service
Lucknow, November 15
Have cases of acute encephalitis syndrome/ Japanese encephalitis (AES/JE) in Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das Medical College really come down as the UP Government is claiming or categorising patients under acute febrile illness (AFI) bringing down the numbers?
Speaking at a function in August, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath claimed that deaths due to encephalitis had come down by 65 per cent in UP during the last two years. Substantiating the CM’s claim, BRD Medical College Principal Dr Ganesh Kumar some time ago said in 2019, around 87 patients of AES/JE had been admitted to the hospital out of which 19 children died.
He said in 2017, the total number of AES/JE patients was 2,248 of which 512 died while in 2018 the number of AES/JE patients was 1,047 with 166 deaths. In 2005, the worst in recent years, the disease had claimed the lives of more than 1,500 children.
However, a section of doctors claimed that in a bid to bring down the official data of AES/JE patients, the BRD Medical College administration is manipulating data due to which the unrecorded AES/JE patients are suffering as they are being denied access to full follow up services.
This year acute febrile illness (AFI) patients, who report with high fever which may be due to dengue, chikangunia, typhoid, have seen an alarming increase at 1,563 cases till November.
Around 13 per cent or 215 patients admitted under AFI after investigations turned out to be JE positive cases.
Interestingly, of 492 cases admitted under AES, only 116 (23 per cent) were JE positive cases after investigations, further strengthening the fear that cases were deliberately being recorded under AFI to keep the AES numbers down.
Denying patients AES categorisation stalls their accessing critical follow-up services.
Sources point out that before 2018, AFI was unheard of in BRD Medical College. Only after the introduction of this category has the number of AES/JE cases started dramatically dropping.
In August 2017, the BRD Medical College hit national headlines when piped oxygen supply dried up taking close to 70 lives of infants within 54 hours in the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit (NNICU) of the hospital.
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via Today’s News Headlines
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