Kolkata: Encephalitis is a mosquito-borne viral disease.
Birds living near water bodies and also carry the disease.
The virus belongs to a group of disorders known as zoonotic diseases, which are spread between animals and humans, and are common in societies where poverty and illiteracy are widespread — and where people depend on animals for their livelihoods.
Decades of neglect and poor health care infrastructure have allowed infectious diseases to devastate the lives of thousands of people in India.
This presents huge challenges to health professionals, policymakers and researchers in their efforts to combat diseases.
Along with encephalitis, researchers say anthrax, brucellosis, bovine tuberculosis, Chikungunya, dengue, Avian influenza, plague, Sars and acute encephalitis syndrome (AES) — have failed to receive the official recognition and funding needed to combat them effectively.
These zoonotic diseases that have and continue to take a heavy toll of human life in India, officials say.
Japanese encephalitis and AES kill hundreds of children in the eastern parts of the country every year, lowering life expectancy.
Reports of deaths due to Chikungunya, dengue and highly infectious Congo Haemorrhagic Fever are also not uncommon in the country, particularly during the monsoon.
“The infrastructure to combat such outbreak simply does not exist. Presently teams of doctors are trying to provide some relief and use known methods to try to prevent further spread. But viruses like these needs to tackled all year long, but such provisions do not exist in the present system anywhere in the country,” said member of the national medical team visiting the affected districts.
“We are fighting a losing battle, as there is no cure for AES. Once the fever reaches the brain, there is little medical science can do. The battle has being lost long before, as most the patients that are admitted at the district hospitals are at the very last stage. None of the village level clinics have any infrastructure to detect the fever. They treat every fever like cough and cold leading to such high rate of mortality especially among children,” said another doctor of North Bengal Medical College and Hospital.
Though the government is now starting fever clinics in all the affected districts on a warfooting, along with massive cleaning drives to ensure that the disease does not spread further, experts say such measures should have long been taken.
“Just because, the virus did not reach epidemic proportions in the last two years, the entire machinery to prevent such diseases just vanished, along with hundreds of lives. Also animal farms were allowed to start near human population lead to such a disaster. The planning has to be much advanced along with immaculate implementation,” admitted a government official.
