Medical facilities at airport will be upgraded: Patel

Mumbai: In the fifth such case in two months, a passenger died after suffering a cardiac arrest at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport on Thursday morning. Clement D’Cruz (47) had arrived from New York and was waiting for his connecting flight to Chennai, when he collapsed at about 8 am.
According to cardian surgeon Dr Devi Shetty, heart diseases have assumed ‘epidemic’ proportions nowadays, and “these patients would have died in any case, wherever they had been.” However, he admits to a “small correlation between flying and cardiac arrest.”
“Air travel can cause a clot formation in the leg artery, known as deep vein thrombosis, which can then travel to the lungs and block the arteries resulting in acute pulmonary embolism, which in turn can cause sudden death,’’ he explains.
Shetty further points out that in case of a heart attack, resuscitation reduces the chances of death from 50 per cent to five per cent. Therefore, it is crucial to have required resuscitation equipment, including ECG machine, defibrillator, oxygen, ambubags and life saving medicines, at the airport.
Significantly, this equipment is available at Mumbai airport and had been “mobilised as soon as we received the message that the passenger had collapsed and was frothing at the mouth,” said a spokesperson for Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL). “However, he was not responding at all and was declared dead before he could be taken to the hospital.’’
Shetty strongly recommends that paramedics be present at the airport for such medical emergencies, but “such a concept is currently alien to India,’’ he adds ruefully.
Talking to mediapersons, Union Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel said, “Its neither the airports nor the airlines’ fault. But medical facilities at the airport will be upgraded along with the upgradation and modernisation of Mumbai airport.”
22/12/06 Mumbai Newsline

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