Apart from the political mudslinging, the vector-borne diseases have also left doctors divided with some asserting only 0.1 per cent people run the risk of dying due to its complications while other medical professionals attribute the fatalities to the vector-borne disease.

“1 out of 1,000 people, i.e., 0.1 per cent run the risk of dying due to chikungunya complications and that too if the patient has co-morbid conditions. Chikungunya is otherwise non-fatal,” AIIMS head of the department (medicine) S.K. Sharma said.

At least 15 deaths due to chikungunya complicatio-ns have been reported at various city hospitals, including one at AIIMS, while over 2,600 people have been affected by the mosquito-borne fever this season.

“If one analyses the deaths, attributed to chikungunya, being reported in Delhi, you would realise that most of them had co-morbid conditions, like hypertension or diabetes or kidney or other renal problems. Chikungunya as such cannot cause death,” AIIMS director M.C. Misra said.

But doctors at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital (SGRH), where nearly half of these deaths have been recorded, say it was chikungunya that precipitated the death.

“Yes, most of these patients were old and had co-morbidity, but why are people finding it hard to believe that chikungunya cannot cause death. There are six crore diabetic people in Delhi, nearly 15 lakh suffer from blood pressure problems, they weren’t dying earlier,” Dr S.P. Byo-tra, chairman of department of medicine at SGRH, said.

Dr Suranjit Chatterjee, se-nior consultant in Depart-ment of Internal Medicine at Apollo Hospital, says, while a debate over the fatality issue is fine, “doctors should not get dogmatic that chikungunya cannot lead to death”.