The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has sent notices to all major private hospitals to report cases of high fever to the BMC control room.

"We have already told all the private doctors and hospitals that it was mandatory to specify the number of patients admitted with high fever every day after we issued the notification for leptospirosis last week. But since many of the major private hospitals did not follow this, our chief executive J V Telang had to issue notices to them," BMC Additional Commissioner V L Patankar said on Wednesday.

"We came to know that these major hospitals were also getting patients with high fever and even some malaria cases were admitted, but they did not inform the BMC control room," he said.

The information from these hospitals will only help us to know the locality from where they have come so that we could enhance our prevention methods, which BMC is already carrying out in the city, Patankar said.

• Terrible Tuesday: Mumbai copes with a calamity

Asked whether any confirmed cases of leptospirosis have been reported with the experts' investigation of the blood samples of the patients admitted, Patankar said, "The preliminary tests on suspected leptospirosis done showed 32 probable (one stage before final confirmation) out of the 136 suspected among the 159 died in the city till Wednesday."

Further confirmation would take at least a week, he said. The death toll due to water-borne diseases in the megapolis since last 24 hours till 8 am Wednesday is 17, he said.

Meanwhile, 20 serious cases are still under close observation and are under ventilators. "The situation needs to be watched carefully," Patankar said.

Replying to a question on the trend in admission of patients with fever, Additional Commissioner Manu Srivastava said, "The trend is definitely coming down and the number of patients getting admitted has also come down."

On Tuesday, the figure was 874 while on August 15, 958 patients were admitted, showing a definite downward trend, Srivastava said.

The number of patients admitted in Mumbai in the last 24 hours ending at 8 am on Wednesday is 727.

The number of deaths is also showing a decline as it is below 20% for the past three days including Wednesday as compared to last week, he said.

Terrible Tuesday: Mumbai copes with a calamity