VADODARA, Sept 21: Scores of patients flow into the Sir Sayaji General (SSG) hospital every day, and the majority of them carry communicable diseases. Doctors who attend to these patients without adequate safeguards do so at great risk to themselves, as recent incidents have shown.Yesterday, four junior doctors in the Surgery department were reportedly diagnosed with Tuberculosis. This is not the first time such cases have been reported, and junior doctors lament that the absence of safeguards, coupled with unhygienic conditions in the hospital, is making them vulnerable to communicable diseases.``There have been cases where doctors have been afflicted by these diseases. There aren't enough safeguards, and such cases are bound to multiply,'' said an RMO, adding that ten such cases exist currently in the hospital.Doctors say that a large nember of patients at the hospital carry Tuberculosis and Hepatitis B. ``The ideal way to prevent such infections is through a nutritious diet or, to some extent, the Bacillae Culmitte Gurien (BCG) vaccination,'' says one doctor.But considering the duty hours the medicos have to put in (at times 24 hours), it become difficult to adhere to a proper nutritional regimen. ``It is very difficult to manage a proper diet with the kind of working hours we have. In the process, our immunity system gets affected,'' a doctor said. Even BCG vaccination is not 100 per cent effective as a check.Hospital Superintendent Dr Kamal Pathak, though, said he was unaware of the recent cases. He admitted that the junior doctors were indeed vulnerable to communicable diseases, particularly because the quantum of patients who visit the hospital carrying such diseases is quite high.But he said that diseases such as TB can only affect the medicos if their immunity is not strong enough. ``It is all to do with immunity. For that it is necessary to take a nutritional diet'' Dr Pathak said.Though doctors in all the departments are vulnerable to these diseases, the most affected departments, according to doctors, were Orthopedics and Medicine. ``In the Ortho department, numerous cases of TB of various body parts are attended to every day. So is the case with the medicine department,'' a senior doctor said.Though as per norms, all government doctors who are afflicted by TB are entitled to six months' special leave, for the RMOs there is no special leave as they are considered `students'. Sources said that there have been instances when the affected RMOs have `silently' proceeded on leave after being affected. ``At times the junior doctors do not even disclose that they are affected, and proceed on leave on some other pretext,'' a senior doctor said.What makes matters worse for the junior doctors are the unhygienic conditions in the wards in which they have to work. Though the general complaints of the patients is that it is the hospital management which fails to take adequate care of cleanliness, medicos allege that even the patients are to be blamed for the worsening cleanliness in the hospital.``At times there is scant respect for cleanliness, and all wastes are dumped by patients in the wards itself. All ours efforts to convince them goes abegging,'' lamented a doctor.
