NEW DELHI —  At India's premier public hospital, dozens of people suffering from dengue fever lay on stretchers in the narrow corridors.

Other patients at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences had to fashion makeshift equipment, clipping intravenous drips to unused fire extinguisher brackets or simply holding the IVs in their hands.

Since the dengue season began as the monsoon season tapered off in late August, 2,900 cases have been reported across India with 39 people dying from the disease, Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said Thursday.

Officials and experts say a spike in media coverage has sparked an uproar in and around New Delhi. On Thursday alone, doctors at the All India Institute, known as AIIMS, examined some 1,000 patients, admitting 34 of them, said hospital spokesman Dr. Shakti Gupta.

"There is no need to panic,"Ramadoss said."The only problem is that the media created a scare."

Many newspapers are filled daily with dengue reports, from recriminations against the government to advice on how to combat mosquitoes.

Dengue first became big news in India over the weekend as word spread that one of the doctors at AIIMS had died from the disease and another 19 doctors and medical students there had been infected.

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The reports started a wave of coverage that continued Thursday with news that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's grandsons were suffering from fevers and being tested for the disease.

A big part of the problem in New Delhi is that AIIMS is officially the only state-run hospital designated to treat dengue.

"A scare was created, everybody with fever rushed to the AIIMS,"Ramadoss said.

India is on track to match the roughly 4,000 cases reported in 2004, the last year for which figures were available. But the numbers arenowhere near the 13,000 cases reported in 2003.

"It is absolutely normal. After the monsoon, we always have dengue cases,"said Sampath Krishnan of the World Health Organization's communicable disease department in India."We'll have more cases and it will taper off by end of October."

Female aedes mosquitoes transmit dengue, and symptoms include high fever, joint pain, headache and vomiting. It is fatal in rare cases.

The annual outbreak comes as monsoon rains, which begin in June and usually end in September, subside, leaving behind countless small pools and puddles of dirty, stagnant water where infectious mosquitoes breed. Open sewers that are features of many Indian towns and cities provide even more breeding grounds.

In an effort to control this year's outbreak, municipal workers have been spraying pesticides in markets, residential areas and parks around Delhi since the start of the week.

Meanwhile, a rare mosquito-borne viral fever known as chikungunya killed another four people overnight in southern India, bringing the death toll from that disease in the state of Kerala to 75 in the past month, said the state's health ministry.

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Associated Press writers Ashok Sharma and Nirmala George contributed to this report.

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