Times
of India: Mumbai: Sunday, 03 May 2015.
The 'Maximum City' takes a massive toll on the
heart: 80 Mumbaikars died every day due to heart attacks between March 2014 and March 2015, up from 67 deaths daily during the same period the previous year.
Data given out by BMC in response to a Right to
Information query showed that 29,393 deaths due to heart attacks were registered in the city during the between
March 2014 and March 2015.
In the previous financial year, 24,603 Mumbaikars had succumbed to
heart attacks.
The seriousness of Mumbai's heart problem can be
gauged from the fact that heart attacks account for a third of annual deaths in
the city. For instance, 31% of the 93,254 deaths recorded in Mumbai in 2014-15 were due to heart attacks, showed the RTI data. "We have been
collating Mumbai's health data since 2010 and found that roughly 70,000 to 80,000 deaths occur every day. Heart attacks account for the biggest chunk,''
said Milind Mhaske from Praja Foundation, an NGO that brings out a white paper
on the city's health every year.
The present data was collated by RTI activist
Chetan Kothari by filing an application under the Right to Information Act with
the BMC's health department. "Heart attacks have been the leading killers
for the last 15 years. Tuberculosis comes a distant second and cancer is the third medical
cause for deaths,'' said Kothari. The BMC data showed that in 2014-15, at least 19 Mumbaikars died due to tuberculosis while 18 others died due to cancer
every day.
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