At the beginning of January, Awanti Naik’s symptoms sneaked out for her for the first time, starting with a double perspective and fast, weakening headache and a strange feeling on her face.
“In my jaw and my eyes was heavy and my neck was completely blocked,” she said. “I was very concerned.”
She and her husband hurried to the hospital, where she spent 12 days in the intensive care unit to bind an IV for food because she couldn’t speak or swallow.
Naik, a teacher of public school, said she tried to communicate with the doctors to find out whether she would ever recover from her facial paralysis.
“I thought ‘I didn’t want to live like this. I don’t want to live with double vision,” said Naik, 40, to CBC News from her home in Pune, a city in western Maharashtra state, where it is slowly recovering.
In it, the Guillain-Barré syndrome or GBS was diagnosed, a rare autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system attacks its nerves and causes muscle weakness and different levels of paralysis.
32 still in intensive care
From Thursday, NAIK’s is one of 212 confirmed cases of GBS in Pune, all part of an outbreak in which new patients were continued to diagnose in a city who quickly grew into an education and information technology hub.
After Thursday afternoon, 11 people died there, two in the last 48 hours, according to officials in Pune City.
More than a dozen patients are on ventilation devices, 32 still in the intensive care unit.
As soon as the type of outbreak has been identified, the local authorities quickly worked on freeing beds in state hospitals and covering costs, said Dr. AMEET Dravid, specialist for infectious diseases in the privately running Poona Hospital.
But the first days of the outbreak in early January, when many patients with severe diarrhea and crawling paralysis came to ERS, were filled with confusion.
“From one GBS case per month per hospital, we went in each of the three hospitals in a narrow area of Pune six a week, said Dravid, who treated and monitored several patients.
“That was the first suspicion that something was wrong.”
The authorities analyzed body fluids of patients and pursued the outbreak to a pathogen called Campylobacter jejuni, which is a common cause of food diseases and is considered the main type of bacteria to cause GBS around the world.
However, the fault is rare, however, since only a specific tribe of Campylobacter jejuni, which has an outer layer that imitates the structure of nerve cells, actually leads to the development of autoimmune diseases. The external layer around this special tribe of the pathogen is deceptive of the body’s immune system to kill its nerve cells next to the bacteria, which causes paralysis in the patient.
Challenges in treatment
The World Health Organization has sent teams to Pune to help the local health workers persecute and monitoring cases in the affected area to ensure that “every suspected case is identified, diagnosed and treated”, ” In an release it says.
GBS is notoriously difficult to diagnose, especially for doctors in remote parts of India, since it requires special test kits.
“If this had happened in a rural area, it would have been very difficult to diagnose these GBS cases” help to identify the cause of paralysis.
After extensive tests on more than 6,000 water samples, the officers pursued the probable source of the pathogen, which so many made sick with serious diarrhea, on contaminated fountains and several other water sources.
They believe that bacterial contamination in the water supply has been initiated in the area in which the outbreak is concentrated, but do not know how it occurred.
“We have to wake up”
Together with the state authorities of Maharashtra, health officers in Pune have repeatedly asked the residents not to panic and that measures are available to control the contamination, although these measures are unclear.
At first there were also concerns that traces of the pathogen were found on raw chicken, but the officials said that several rehearsals were negative. Experts believe that if poultry wore the pathogen, it could have been after it was washed with water that contained the bacteria.
“This is a failure of public health,” said Dravid. “We have to wake up.”
The city of Pune, India, has reported dozens of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome or GBS, a rare disturbance in which the body’s immune system attacks its nerves and causes paralysis. According to the authorities, the outbreak is connected to a pathogen in contaminated water.
The extent of the outbreak shows a bigger problem in a rapidly developing India, other measures in public health have not kept pace at the pace of urbanization, the doctor said.
“There is now growing that public health must have more importance,” said Dravid, especially since Pune saw a record number of dengue cases last year during a very wet monsoon.
The viral disease transmitted by mosquitoes is also a significant problem of public health because they cause longer health problems and the annual mortality rate increases. Last year was that worst For global dengue cases.
As far as GBS is concerned, the restoration rate is quite high – usually about 95 percent, although the degrees of relaxation vary. However, the complication is that there is no healing and the treatment is expensive.
After the initial immune attack causes muscle weakness and crawling paralysis, GBS patients generally need time and significant physiotherapy to repair nerve damage.
A considerable number of dravid patients still have weakness in their limbs or symptoms such as tingling and deafness, and others use wheelchairs to fall.
“These are the real costs of this war that we fought last month.”
Long -term effects
Naik and her family feel the costs associated with their illness – she is still plagued by double vision and cannot teach.
She temporarily lost her income when she tried to recover; Her mother has moved to her house to help with the daily tasks while she is sick.
“(Our) finances were in crisis because the treatment is very, very expensive,” said Naik, whereby her health insurance did not cover the full costs and the hospital employee did not cover the remaining payment before managing her medication. The state government began covering treatment costs for patients in state hospitals at the end of January, not private.
She said she was trying to keep a positive view for her 16-year-old daughter.
But mostly there is concern about your view and the condition of the water to which you and your family have access.
“I’m very afraid to drink water at all or eat fruit or vegetables. I don’t know, is it safe?”
