With 91 more deaths in the metropolis and Thane district since Sunday night, the death toll due to leptospirosis and other water-borne diseases has risen to 233, Maharashtra Directorate of Health services sources said on Monday.
However, a senior health official told PTI that there was no further rise in fever cases and that there were signs of the outbreak plateauing out.
"We expect it to decline in a couple of days," he said. Mumbai alone accounted for 128 deaths since the July 26 deluge, sources said.
Meanwhile, 958 persons were admitted to various hospitals in Mumbai with complaints of fever in the last 24 hours ending at 8 am on Monday, while the cumulative figure since July 27 was 6311, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation health official Umesh Aijal said.
However, many of them were discharged after treatment, he added.
A medical team from Delhi and Port Blair had analysed 61 samples from Kalyan, Dombivili and Ullasnagar, confirming 36 of them as cases of leptospirosis.
"Almost 60 per cent of the cases had shown to be confirmed cases of leptospirosis," director, National Institute of Research in Reproductive Health at Parel, Dr Chander Puri told PTI in Mumbai on Monday.
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Scientists from various centres including Delhi's National Institute of Communicable Diseases, and the Regional Medical Research Centre of the Indian Council for Medical Research for Leptospirosis, Port Blair had arrived on Friday to carry out confirmation tests for leptospirosis cases in Mumbai and Thane districts.
The ICMR's centre at Parel has set up a round-the-clock facility for these scientists to diagnose and confirm the cases with their sophisticated kits, Puri said.
"We now have kits that can handle 5000 samples and therefore, we request people and hospitals, who want to get their patients condition confirmed for proper treatment, to avail of the facility which is done free of cost," he said.
Meanwhile, UNICEF personnel would be joining the BMC in their door-to-door campaign from Monday for checking, testing and if necessary, admitting patients to nearby hospitals for further treatment.
This kind of campaign was essential as many people were not getting themselves admitted despite having symptoms of the disease, Assistant BMC Commissioner Manukumar Srivastava said.
Asked whether the number of cases of malaria were on the rise, BMC Chief Health Executive J V Telang said, "cases of malaria are always on the higher side during the four months of monsoon and this time has been no exception. However, precautionary measures are being taken to reduce the cases."
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