Bareilly: After 37 persons died of fever in the area, state health minister Sidharth Nath Singh visited Bareilly on Tuesday and suspended district malaria officer (DMO) Dr PK Jain for “carelessness”.Singh said, “In December 2017, the state government prepared a work plan to deal with vector-borne diseases, Japanese encephalitis and AES. The plan gave us good results where it was implemented, but we were worried about what went wrong in Bareilly. Under the plan, apart from taking slides, a test has to be performed through RDT kit to know whether the person is suffering from malaria or not. As the plan has not been implemented properly, I immediately suspend DMO and strict action will be taken against him.”Bareilly chief medical officer Vineet Shukla had served notice to the DMO on Monday after the central and state teams found presence of falciparum malaria (which is considered fatal) in areas under Majhgavan block, “but reports presented by him did not mention about it”. The CMO had served a similar notice to Dr Vaibhav Rathore, medical office incharge, Majhgavan community health centre, for not regularly checking test reports.The state minister said, “During inspection of the district hospital, it was found that there is lack of coordination between chief medical superintendents (CMS) of joint district hospital and women’s district hospital. I have issued warning to them and if the condition does not improve by Thursday, they will not remain on their posts.” The two medical superintendents had a dispute over allowing beds for fever patients in the women’s district hospital.Asked about the cause of fever, the health minister said, “There is no mystery disease here. It is a vector-borne disease, like malaria, and the fever is caused due to breeding of mosquitoes because of filth.” Singh, however, said the fever cases will not be declared an epidemic in Bareilly. The minister said 8,317 fever cases have been reported in the district so far. Slides of 3,900 persons have been tested while 17,000 chlorine tablets and 6,500 ORS packets have been distributed, he added.“We are upgrading 51 district hospitals of UP, including Bareilly, with the help of World Bank by April 2019. There is shortage of doctors in India and we are opening new medical colleges,” said the health minister. He appealed to people to contact PHCs and CHCs, rather than going to quacks, and directed the DM and SSP to take strict action against quacks in the region.Finance minister Rajesh Agarwal, who accompanied the health minister, said, “Chief minister Yogi Adityanath has been worried about fever cases in Bareilly and Badaun. He directed Singh to visit Bareilly to monitor it.” Badaun CMO Manjeet Singh said, “In the past 15 days, fever has claimed 16 lives in Badaun district.”In the evening hours, Singh paid a random visited to Jagatpur Panvariya area and found chocked drains and overflowing sewer lines. He found that Jagatpur urban PHC was closed.Bareilly CMO Vineet Shukla said, “The health minister asked me to take action against city health officer Dr Ashok Kumar after seeing filth in Jagatpur and three doctors – Sweta Bhardwaj, Geetika Naik and Vashika – on finding urban PHC closed. Though the closure timings of urban PHC is 4 pm, it should have remained opened due to rise in vector-borne diseases. I will write to the principal secretary (health) to take action against them.”

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