Shillong, September 27: The dengue crisis in West Bengal is causing concern as the state government refuses to disclose vital data on affected individuals and death statistics.
As per IANS, unlike previous years, this year, there is no data available on the central website for West Bengal. The National Centre for Vector Borne Disease Control (NCVBDC) simply marks the figures as “NR” (not reported).
What’s perplexing is that the West Bengal health department has stopped officially releasing weekly data on dengue cases, which they used to do in the past. This is a significant departure from previous years when NCVBDC had access to all related data.
Unofficial sources claim that as of September 24, the total number of dengue cases has surpassed 38,000.
This alarming situation has sparked a political dispute. Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the president of West Bengal’s Congress party and a five-time Lok Sabha member, has called it a “man-made dengue crisis.” He accuses the government of being aware of the issue but not taking it seriously, even instructing doctors not to cite dengue as the cause of death to avoid negative publicity.
The leader of the opposition in the West Bengal Assembly has made a similar allegation. He points out that while other state governments are sharing dengue-related data with the Union government, West Bengal is the exception. He claims that the state government is concealing the true number of dengue-related deaths by pressuring doctors to list them as deaths due to unknown diseases.
Even the medical community in the state is concerned about the suppression of facts, stating that it only exacerbates the dengue crisis. Dr. Manas Gumta, the general secretary of the Association of Health Service Doctors, emphasizes that hiding information does not help control the dengue menace and only adds to the confusion.