In Maha, heat stroke cases 5 times higher than 2015
Villagers have to wait for hours in the heat and keep on working the pump trying to get a vessel full of water
On April 17, seven hours after a bout of severe nausea, Yogita Desai, 12, died of heat stroke at a village 100 kilometers from Beed city in Marathwada, which is witnessing drought for the third consecutive year. Her parents rued that they could not even take their daughter to a bigger hospital to save her life.
“She was put on saline after which she was talking and eating biscuits,” said her mother, Manisha. She then slept next to her father on the hospital cot but never woke up.
Her neighbours said that Yogita had walked to the hand pump to collect water and was also playing in the open. Her mother and father, both landless labourers, were away in the afternoon, the neighbours said.
Like other children in the village, Yogita would also work the hand pump. It is not that you press the hand pump and water gushes out. Villagers have to wait for hours in the heat and keep on working the pump trying to get a vessel full of water.
The number of deaths as a result of the scorching heat, what doctors classify as heat stroke, this year has increased five times compared to the whole of 2015.
The number of patients who have developed heat stroke -- a fatal condition where a person vomits, complains of nausea and giddiness -- has increased 20 times, according to the state health department. Between January and May this year, the state health department has recorded 409 cases of heat stroke across the state -- most of them reported from Marathwada.
Yogita who was born with a low birth weight, doctors said, was always a malnourished child.
“She was weak but we had done everything to improve her health,” said Manisha. “If doctors would have told us that she is critical, we would have taken her to a bigger hospital.”
Vidya Kakade, the doctor who treated Yogita, is not sure how the child’s condition worsened. “She responded to the saline and I don’t know how suddenly she deteriorated. We didn’t once think that she would die,” said Dr Kakade, an ayurvedic doctor in the village.
A week before Yogita’s death, a 68-year-old farmer from Manzari, Beed, died of heat stroke. Health officials said that he had gone to the farm in the afternoon. “After he came home, he felt uneasy, started vomiting and died at the hospital,” said Dr Sandeep Sangle, district health officer.
The increase in number of people developing heat stroke is keeping hospitals busy. On Friday, Sayed Mehidi, 65, was admitted to civil hospital in
Beed after he complained of nausea. “I could not walk. I was going to the mosque and suddenly collapsed,” said Mehidi who is admitted in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the hospital.