MC asks hospital to report cause of Chopra’s death

Mumbai: As Yash Chopra's death triggered fears of the city being in the grips of an outbreak of dengue, the BMC on Monday asked Lilavati Hospital in Bandra for a report about the exact cause of the veteran filmmaker's death. 

    The death audit, as such exercises are called, follows union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad's statement in Chennai that every dengue death should be audited. TOI had reported last week that private labs in Mumbai have been seeing more than a thousand cases of dengue per month. The BMC figures, meanwhile, were 242 in September and 198 in October tillMonday.Againstthisbackdrop, experts feel it is prudent that an audit is carried out in Chopra's case. In fact, reports said the Centre has asked the BMC for Chopra's audit report. 
    Additional municipal commissioner Manisha Mhaiskar told TOI that Lilavati Hospital would soon submit its report after analysing the cause of death. Chopra was admitted to the hospital on October 13, where he was diagnosed with dengue and immediately admitted to the ICU and put on ventilator. BMC officials pointed out that dengue usually has low fatality, but it could be fatal for patients who are old and have chronic diseases such as diabetes. 
    A spokesperson for Yashraj studios said on Monday that Chopra had succumbed to a combination of dengue and pneumonia. 
    But BMC health officials are not too impressed with the demand for making dengue notifiable. They noted that for all practical purpose it does micro-map the disease; every doctor sends a copy of dengue diagnosis to the local BMC health office, which in turn carries out surveillance and fumigation operations in the locality concerned. 
    Mhaiskar said, "At the ward level, we have been getting data on all dengue cases even from private hospitals and labs, so that we can do better micro-mapping of the disease. Whenever we find more than five dengue patients from the same area or a cluster of breeding sites, our teams go there for vector control anyway." 
    The BMC is applying the same plan of action it had successfully applied to bring down malaria in the city two years ago. The only difference is that it is the well-to-do sections of the society that seems to be the victim this time round. "Malaria was more rampant in slums and construction sites. But even though our micro-mapping exercise has showed dengue to be prominent in the same areas where malaria was seen earlier, it is the middle and upper middle class,thatissuffering from dengue in the same areas," she said.