The civic administration has reacted by banning the sale of food through road-side open stalls and asking for all such joints to be closed until further notice. ``We have confiscated 30 such food carts in Dombivli and 18 in Kalyan for violating the ban,'' a senior health department officer said.

Separate wards have been set up in the KDMC's Shastri Nagar and Rukminibai hospitals to treat patients. ``We have also set up a free jaundice treatment clinic at the Manjunath Health Centre, Dombivli in cooperation with the Ayurvedic Sewa Sangh,'' said the health officer, Dr V R More. Though he put up a brave front saying that the incidenceof the disease was not as high as was being feared, More admitted that according to rules even if five cases were detected in one area it constituted an epidemic. When asked why the administration took so long to accept that there was an epidemic, he said: ``We were still involved in data collection.''

Interestingly, a majority of the 118 cases which were detected today were being treated at private hospitals. When asked why it was so, More refused to answer saying that he did not want to be ``drawn into any controversy.'' Balkrishna Desle (42), a patient, however was more forthcoming: ``One look at the civic hospitals and you feel it's better to die at home than going there.''

Admitting that only contaminated water could have led to such a wide spread of the virus, More said the water supply department had been asked to undertake an emergency study to plug the sources of contamination. However, he claimed that ``there may be hardly one or two instances of sewerage contaminating drinking water.'' On beingtold that complaints of foul-smelling water with suspended particles were quite common, he blamed private housing societies for it. ``Most of these societies do not bother to clean up the overhead and underground water storage tanks for years on end,'' he alleged.

More also complained that private practitioners were not keeping his department informed. ``We are holding a meeting with associations of private practitioners on May 8 to help us coordinate better.''

The health officer said the survey would cover all the 96 KDMC wards and the entire town would be ``covered in a week's time.'' Pamphlets detailing preventive steps are being handed out to residents as a part of the door-to-door survey (SEE BOX). More said patients must insist on separate sterile syringes with a separate sterile needles for each injection and should take them only when prescribed by a qualified doctor.