Date:06/10/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/10/06/stories/2006100617851600.htm

National

AIIMS campus hygiene under scrutiny

Bindu Shajan Perappadan

NEW DELHI: With nine new patients from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) campus being admitted with dengue in the past 24-hours, the country's premiere medical institute has earned the dubious distinction of registering the highest number of dengue cases of its own.

With 31 dengue cases till date, including one in which a student subsequently died, the AIIMS administration still maintains that sanitation and hygiene is not a problem in the campus.

Incidentally, the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) claims to have served the Institute 30 notices this year so far for not maintaining proper sanitation and hygiene levels and allowing breeding of mosquitoes in the premises.

The new cases of dengue on the campus have indicated that the Institute perhaps did not pay heed to the early warning signals.

Speaking about the NDMC notices, AIIMS Medical Superintendent D.K. Sharma said: "We have received only one notice [on October 3] from the NDMC so far. The other notices that they claim to have issued may have been to individuals, which is not the responsibility of AIIMS administration."

However, NDMC Medical Health Officer Lt. Col (Retd.) S.K. Garg said: "We have issued notices to AIIMS about the unhygienic condition prevailing in the campus, but with the administration claiming that they haven't got any notice from us, we have recently issued a notice to the administration."

Second to none

Maintaining that the sanitation and hygiene standard in the hospital was second to none, AIIMS spokesperson Shakti Gupta said: "We have in place a standard protocol to ensure that sanitation and hygiene is maintained. Extra precautionary measures are put in place every April onwards and we do extra spraying and fogging to control mosquito breeding in the campus... Now we have started cleaning after the out patient department hours and during the night when the patient load is less. However, the biggest achievement so far has been the fact that we have been able to float a tender and allocate the contract for covering of the open `nalla' outside the Institute."