In a week, scrub typhus kills 15

NAGPUR: After dengue, the bacterial disease scrub typhus is worrying the citizens and health authorities of Nagpur, where one more person died of the disease at the local government-run medical college and hospital on Friday, taking the toll to 15 over the past week.

More than 60 patients -- most of them in the age group of 30 to 45 years -- have been admitted at the hospital for treatment of the louse-borne disease and 15 have been put on ventilator, hospital officials said. The patient who died on Friday evening was identified as Madhukar Pudke of the Nandanwan area in east Nagpur.

Scrub typhus, also known as bush typhus, is a disease caused by a bacteria called Orientia Tsutsugamushi. It spreads among human beings through bites of infected chiggers (larval mites). The most common symptoms of scrub typhus include fever, headache, body ache, and sometimes rash.

Abhimanyu Niswade, the dean of the government medical college and hospital, said that around 60 people have been detected with scrub typhus in his hospital. The number of patients is increasing rapidly in the city.

“Most of the patients are from other districts of the region while a few are from neighbouring Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states,” Niswade said.

Maharashtra minister for public health Deepak Sawant visited the medical college and hospital a few days ago and instructed the authorities to take adequate steps to curb the spread of the disease.

A senior government medical college official said the hospital was not equipped to treat the disease, urging that an emergency facility be opened with experts and equipment needed to treat scrub typhus.

Experts at the New Delhibased National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) called it a localised outbreak.

“These are laboratory-confirmed cases of simple scrub typhus. It’s a localised outbreak which is not unusual in this season,” said an official at NCDC, requesting anonymity. A team of NCDC experts from Delhi is monitoring the situation. “Our team has been there for almost a week now. The disease is treatable using antibiotics such as Doxycycline. There is no cause for concern,” said the official cited above