Hypertension, diabetes biggest killers: Report
NEW DELHI: Each year, more people die of hypertension and diabetes in Delhi than dengue or malaria, says a new report released on Wednesday.
The ‘State of Health of Delhi’ report was released by the NGO Praja Foundation.
In 2015, 3,890 hypertension-related and 1,356 diabetes-related deaths were reported from hospitals and dispensaries run by the Delhi government and the municipal corporations.
The year before, 1,962 hypertension-related deaths and 1,762 diabetes related deaths were recorded.
In the communicable diseases category, tuberculosis took the maximum toll, killing 3,635 people in 2015 and 4,350 the year before.
“In the same period, we found that the counsellors and the MLAs did not raise a single question regarding tuberculosis,” said Milind Mhaske, project director of Praja Foundation.
In the same period, dengue killed 486 during 2015, when Delhi had its worst ever outbreak, and 74 in 2014. Malaria killed 164 in 2015 and 160 in 2014, according to the report.
The data for the report was collected by the Praja Foundation through RTIs to various government institutions.
Diarrhoea affected more Delhiites than any of the other seven diseases for which data was collected. On an average, from 2014 to 2016, Delhi saw an average of almost six lakh cases annually and 41% of those who died of diarrhoea were under the age of four.
“During the last three years when Delhi saw an extremely high number of diarrhoea cases, the civic authorities received a high number of complaints about polluted water. Issues of water supply constituted 50% of all complaints on civic issues that were lodged in 2016,” said Anjali Shrivastava, assistant manager at Praja Foundation.
The zone-wise distribution of the data showed that between 2014 and 2016, Rohini was a hot spot for dengue (contributing 26% of all dengue cases), tuberculosis (33%) and typhoid (27%). Rural Narela contributed the highest number of diarrhoea cases (22%) and civil lines malaria cases (26%).
Through a sample survey of 24,000 households in Delhi in 2017, the report also found that only 24% of the people living in Delhi used the services of government dispensaries and hospitals. This comes even as Delhi government has opened 100 mohalla or neighbourhood clinics and plans to open a total of thousand to bring in more people to the public healthcare system.
The poorest families in Delhi end up spending 11.5% of their family income on healthcare.
The report found that only 15% of Delhi families had at least one family member with some sort of health insurance to pay for their treatment.
The Delhi government also plans to start an insurance scheme for universal coverage which will work on cross-subsidy, meaning premiums of wellto-do people will discount the premiums of the poor.