A deadly form of plague has broken out on Uganda's border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and several people are thought to have died of the disease, the World Health Organization said earlier this week. The agency praised Ugandan health workers for vigilance and prompt action in …
ONE of India's most outstanding economic jewels has lost its glitter. All that Surat could do is wait weak-kneed and groggy for a Pied Piper to slough off its gigantic army of rats and bandicoots, which recently sent the world's most dreaded disease rustling insidiously through India. One of the …
Till September 1994, plague was s 'upposedly a forgotten disease in India. It caught the country's medics aghast at their own ignorance. But after its outbreak, medical authorities have taken to pointing out that they had never claimed the disease had been eradicated from the country. The bacterium which causes …
Although the plague was thought to have been sent packing in 1966, isolated suspected cases have since been reported, the most recent being from Him Pradesh in 1984. Besides, since 1989, the NICD's Bangalore-based Pla Surveillance Unit has been rattling off outbreak predictions - all of them binned. Serum tests …
The plague caught institutions everywhere completely inert. Only the Plague Surveillance Unit (PSU) in Bangalore - the last of its kind in the country - and its sub-unit at Kolar in Karnataka, were active during the 190s. Delhi's National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) had the only group of epidemiologists …
In the wake of the plague came the clamour for plague-beating drugs, particularly tetracycline. Says Prabir Biswas, director (marketing) of the Indian Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Ltd (IDPL), "When all hell broke loose, we had a stock of 4.8 million capsules ready." IDPL's Hrishikesh and Hyderabad plants functioned 24 hours a …
Even as the Maharashtra government faces flak for its inept handling of bubonic plague in Beed district, experts have denounced the state's earthquake reconstruction and rehabilitation programme in the Marathwada region, following the devastation in September last year. In the first comprehensive review of the rehabilitation measures undertaken, A S …
The plague had been virtually non-existent in India for the past 2 decades. What was the cause of the recent outbreak? One thing should be clear: the plague bacilli were always present in various parts of the country among rodents. Whenever there are ecological imbalances, the plague bacilli will create …
MEDIEVAL afflictions were not restricted to Beed, Surat or other parts of India hit by the plague last fortnight. They showed up in the blinkered reception of the news in several supposedly informed quarters in the country, and other nations as well. Take the case of the mainstream Indian press. …
When an outbreak of plague was initially reported in the second week of September from Maharashtra's Beed district, close to Latur, which was ravaged by an earthquake late last year, the state government initially denied the incidence of the disease. Even Union health ministry authori ties chose to ignore a …
