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‘Mystery’ disease baffles Panchkula civil hospital doctors
The Panchkula civil hospital is overwhelmed with patients complaining of high fever , severe body ache, painful eyes, bleeding and low platelet count; amid the burgeoning cases, the hospital authorities have approached PGIMER for help
The district civil hospital in Sector 6 is overwhelmed with patients complaining of high-grade fever, with doctors at a loss about the cause.
Beds in the hospital’s emergency wing are fully occupied, forcing staff to start accommodate two patients on one bed. Doctors say the patients are presenting with fever over 101 F, severe body ache, painful eyes, bleeding and low platelet count.
Amid the burgeoning cases, the hospital authorities have approached PGIMER for help. “We have requested the head of the PGIMER epidemiology department to send teams here to establish the reason behind this sudden rise in fever cases,” said chief medical officer (CMO) Dr Mukta Kumar.
Dr Mankirat, spokesperson for the CMO, said currently 42 patients having high-grade fever were admitted at the hospital. “As many as 80% of the patients arriving at the Internal Medicine OPD, which receives a footfall of around 800 patients a day, have high fever,” the official said.
A doctor, not wishing to be named, said, “Of the total patients arriving in the OPD, we are admitting those who have bleeding complications, like nasal bleeding or blood in urine, platelet count less than 20,000 or low blood pressure, all symptoms of dengue shock syndrome.”
The district has recorded 367 confirmed cases of dengue so far this year — highest in the tricity — and one patient has also succumbed to the disease. But the health department’s data does not reflect deaths due to high-grade fever.
An expert from PGIMER said, “There could be multiple reasons behind the fever. It could be caused by a tropical disease, dengue, scrub typhus, viral infection or viral haemorrhagic fevers. We will have to check all clinical parameters to diagnose the disease (s), for which a number of tests will have to be conducted.”
PGIMER, however, has not witnessed any sudden rise in such cases. Dr RR Sharma, head of blood transfusion department, said, “We are getting 10-12 demands for platelets daily, which is higher than August, but quite less compared to this time last year, when the demand was as high as 100 a day.”
UT director, health services, Dr Suman Singh said Chandigarh’s government hospitals were also receiving fever cases, but the figure was similar to past trends and not alarming.
