Kolkata: A piquant situation has arisen with the family of Asitava Purakayastha, a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) patient, who was certified fit to be released on April 28 by the AMRI Apollo hospital in Kolkata and the West Bengal health department, refusing to take him back.

Purakayastha, a textile machinery expert was admitted to a hospital on April 20 for a heart ailment, but was bundled off to the Beliaghata infectious disease (ID) hospital by doctors the next day as soon as they came to know that he had recently visited China.

Dr D Mukherjee, under whom the 43-year-old expert was admitted to the ID hospital, had said that Purakayastha had showed no sign of SARS and being a heart patient, had been referred to SSKM hospital.

He was admitted to the AMRI Apollo Hospital on April 25.

Purakayastha's family, denying to take him back, argued with doctors that since he had been declared a SARS patient after his blood was examined at the National Institute of Virology Pune, no such certificate had been issued declaring him fit.

They demanded that while the Pune institute detected his blood samples positive for SARS, "it is required to issue a negative report for Asitava before his release from hospital".

In the absence of a "negative" certificate, the family would like to keep Asitava in the hospital.

Hospital doctors tried in vain to convince the patient's family that the release had been ordered as per the guidelines of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC).

PTI