Dengue death toll at 17 in Delhi; Total cases 743

New Delhi, Oct 6 (UNI) As dengue shows no signs of abating, the outbreak of the viral disease in the national capital has so far claimed 17 lives and total number of reported cases has risen to 743.

Of the total number of cases, till 1000 hrs this morning, 469 patients are from Delhi, officials said.

In AIIMS, 30 more people were admitted in the past 24 hours, of which four were from the campus. At present the number of patients afflicted with the viral disease in the hospital is 115 which includes 29 people from the institute, an AIIMS spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said 14 patients were discharged from the hospital today.

During the past 24 hours, at least 950 were screened in the hospital's Emergency OPD. More than 5,000 patients have been screened at the OPD since Tuesday.

Only emergency patients are being admitted in the institute as the hospital is struggling to keep pace with a deluge of dengue patients.

''Only those patients who need emergency medical attention are being admitted. We are facing a severe manpower and resource crunch.... Dengue patients are pouring in from all over in AIIMS but the institute does not have infrastructure to deal with this situation,'' said Dr Anil Sharma, member of the Resident Doctors' Association.

AIIMS today launched a 24-hour helpline to create awareness about the disease.

Two dengue patients died yesterday in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the doctors said.

Fifty-five-year-old Laxmi Narayan, a resident of Bulandshahr, and 22-year-old Dharam Singh, a resident of Delhi's Badarpur area, succumbed to dengue fever yesterday.

The condition of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's two grandsons --Rohan and Madhav-- disgnosed with dengue on Wednesday at AIIMS, is stable. They will be discharged in a couple of days, the spokesperson said.

The worst affected areas from dengue are Najafgarh, Shahdra (North), Central Zones and Karol Bagh, which have reported 69, 60, 52 and 46 cases respectively.

About 130 students and resident doctors from AIIMS submitted a memorandum to AIIMS Director P Venugopal, alleging failure of the administration to check mosquito breeding in the campus.

The memorandum alleged that the death of AIIMS student Raj Kiran was due to the negligence of the management.

''Neither is the death of Raj Kiran or affliction of so many students with dengue a matter of chance. The outbreak of dengue at AIIMS has become an annual affair,'' it said.

Raj Kiran, a seventh semester MBBS student died after suffering from haemorrhagic fever on September 30.

Progressive Medicos and Scientists' Forum spokesperson Dr Vikas Bajpai alleged that AIIMS management's ''callousness had led to the situation in the Institute''.

''At a time when there is an explosion in cases of dengue at AIIMS, most of the senior medical staff of AIIMS casualty has been deputed to organise the Indo-US Summit on Emergency Medicine that is going on at the Institute,'' he said.

''The emergency services have been virtually left to junior doctors who are not oriented to deal with the outbreak of dengue,'' he alleged.

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