Hospitals cash in on dengue scare

HYDERABAD: Some hospitals in the city are apparently using the dengue scare in the city to make a fast buck. The civic authorities have got a whiff of these unfair practices and issued notices to these healthcare facilities.
The municipal corporation got wind of these cases and cracked down. This was after the civic authorities got news that several people who were not suffering from dengue fever were being treated for the dreaded disease, a Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) official said.
A case in point was V Chaitanya.She was being treated for dengue fever at a private hospital.
Half way through the treatment she was told that she was not suffering from the fever at all.
Usually, the doctors put the patients through diagnostic tests such as CBP, CRP, vidal test, LFT, CUE, urine culture, CXR and dengue IgM when they come with complaints of fever. These tests cost around Rs 4,000 in the corporate hospitals, the official said.
When the MCH got to know of these cases, it sent notices to the hospitals warning them that prosecutions would be started against them under the HMC Act, 1955.
The word dengue drives the fear of God into the hearts of people, the MCH official said. And, they end up spending large sums on treatment.
Another patient was similarly made to undergo a number of irrelevant tests. And yet, the hospital concerned did not carry out the mandatory Multiplex Polymerase Chain Reaction examination, which is necessary to detect the dengue virus.
This involves amplification of the dengue virus genome and gives the perfect result for whether the patient is suffering from dengue fever or not, the official said.
The official clarified that hardly any hospital conducts these tests to detect dengue virus. This has spurred the department of health into working on a plan to enforce in all hospitals soon a uniform diagnostic regimen for finding dengue virus, the MCH official said.
The MCH official said all the medical practitioners who treat or becomes cognizant of the existence of infectious diseases or cases of continuous Pyrexia of Unknown Origin (PUO) for more than four days in any private or public dwelling other than a hospital must inform the MCH under section 549 of the HMC Act, 1955.
However, almost all the doctors have so far failed to give any such information to the MCH.