UP to make dengue reporting must

The Akhilesh government has decided to include dengue in the list of notifiable diseases and has made it mandatory that all dengue cases be reported to the authorities concerned.

The Union health ministry had asked the state government to notify cases of dengue in June.

Principal health secretary Arun Sinha said all private practitioners and hospitals across the state will now have to report every case of the mosquito-borne disease, malaria and kala azar to the local public health machinery so that prevention and containment measures can be initiated immediately.

A draft of the order is likely to be finalised on Monday after which penalty will be imposed on the defaulters.

Private hospitals will have to inform the district health officer about probable dengue and dengue haemorrhagic fever cases. Unless confirmed by the Eliza test, a probable case will not be counted as dengue. The test would be done through designated labs. Besides numbers, prevention is an essential part of the order.

Nodal officer for vector-borne diseases control programme, Dr Geeta Yadav, said that the effort will help in better planning for control and management of the diseases.

In UP, where over 3,000 dengue cases were reported in 2015, the state government has not yet updated the number of cases reported this year though the tally of cases reported in Lucknow alone his reached 73.