V idyavati Bagh, the local auxiliary nurse midwife, or ANM, in charge of 22 villages in Odisha’s Bissamcuttack block, patiently listened to...
Vidyavati Bagh, the local auxiliary nurse midwife, or ANM, in charge of 22 villages in Odisha’s Bissamcuttack block, patiently listened to a description of scrub typhus. “No no, we don’t have this disease here,” she said confidently. Sitting in her home, in the village of Dukum in southwest Odisha, the 30-year-old government health worker rattled off with ease, all the known reasons for fever in the area – malaria, dengue, typhoid, and “viral fever”, an umbrella term health workers here often use for fevers they can’t identify.
Bagh, who has been an ANM since March 2019, and whose father was a health worker for most of his life, had never heard of scrub typhus. Yet, 11 km away, in the Christian Hospital Bissamcuttack, at least four patients were receiving intensive care after falling ill with the dangerous bacterial disease.
One, a 36-year-old construction worker, had just had a narrow escape from death. She had been admitted to Christian Hospital on October 4, in shock, with plummeting blood pressure and oxygen levels, and signs of damage to her kidneys. A single mother of a young girl, she spent two days hooked to a BiPAP machine before she could breathe on her own. When I saw...
