Chikungunya: No one’s priority, homeless battle fever & apathy

NEW DELHI: Ashraf sits by the window, almost immobile. Ask him why he is not lying down, and he replies that the pain in his joints is so severe that he cannot move. For almost 10 days now, he has been running a high temperature at a shelter for the homeless at Yamuna Pushta. The chikungunya and dengue fever, raging across the capital, has not spared the homeless, and like Ashraf, there are many who have succumbed to the mosquito’s nasty bite.
When TOI visited the Delhi government’s Geeta Ghat recovery shelter and night shelter complex run by NGO Centre for Equity Studies late on Tuesday, the homeless had just started trickling in for a night’s rest. But already there and whimpering in pain was Nakul Sah. When the caretaker called out to him, the daily wager held out a pouch of medicines and a prescription. He had been sent by the night shelter staff to Aruna Asaf Ali Hospital in Civil Lines the previous day, where he was administered glucose and given some medicines and released in the morning. He had no option but to return to the shelter.
Ashraf lay moaning by the window. He pleaded for a painkiller having exhausted the medicine given to him by the hospital. The pain and fever have left the man in his 40s worrying about his earnings because he is unlikely to be back at work any time soon. He makes a living by pushing carts.
In case the condition of any inmate suffering from fever deteriorates, the shelter staff bundles the patient into an ambulance and sends him to the nearest government hospital. But, as a staffer rued, it is another matter that at the hospitals already teeming with fever cases, the homeless are often the last on the priority list.
At least a dozen homeless inmates at the Geeta Ghat shelter have been complaining every day of fever and fever-like symptoms. After returning from hospitals, the ailing inmates are kept in the recovery facility, where doctors also spend around two hours every day screening fresh cases from among the general homeless.
Fever cases, as across Delhi, are common among the homeless thronging Yamuna Pushta. The staff at a night shelter run by NGO Prayas near Nigambodh Ghat said that complaints of fever have increased, and many come there every day desperate for help. “We have been referring such people to hospitals or sending them for aid to the recovery shelter,” said an attendant.
Officials of the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board, which runs the night shelters across the capital, stressed that while orders for measures such as cleanliness of shelters and assistance to the sick are as per the laid-out protocol, in the given scenario where chikungunya mainly but also dengue are hitting Delhi’s citizenry hard, it plans to reach out to the state health department. “We will seek the services of doctors and request them to visit the shelters to help the homeless,” a senior official said.