Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Congo Fever fear in Ahmedabad

It was a late night conversation with a friend, Manoj, which alerted me about a killer new virus fast gaining ground in Ahmedabad. A common friend's father was admitted at the Shalby Hospital, and now that hospital has become the centre of investigation to identify the virus.

Image source - www.cdc.gov

Its only today morning that I read in the paper (Ahmedabad Mirror)that the virus is perhaps the deadly Congo Virus, also known as Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever or CCHF. None are really sure about the diagnosis of the virus as of now, though.

The virus is carried by domestic animals and transmitted by ticks, and as of now there is no sure-shot treatment as well. Treatment options are limited, one has to basically support the patient's immune system and recovery generally takes a long time. The hospital death rate is around 30%, which is rather high for any such disease. Our neighbour, Pakistan, was afflicted by this last year (though many of us may not be aware of it as it was hardly covered in the Indian media), and many lost their lives.

Is there any particular food one should avoid? Well, I was very keen on knowing this as I had just boiled eggs and was waiting to eat them this morning. Did a quick search and found nothing to connect the two, so I ended up quickly gulping down both of them. It might be dangerous to eat farm animals, though that's pure speculation from my side.

Does this sound ominous? I do not know, just that Shalby Hospital is just next door to our office and I was planning to visit it to get some tests done today. Its likely that my choice of hospital shall change now. I guess enough on this rather paranoid post for now.

Some more newspapers with the news...

Times of India
Indian Express
BBC

6 comments:

  1. Soon we will have a dictionary of the new found viruses listed alphabetically.

    Scary!

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  2. time for anti-virus programmes for humans...you tc man

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  3. hmm, spreads through ticks. reminds me that you picked up a puppy as a defence mechanism yesterday.

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  4. Oh! That's kind of dad...though am hopeful that NID dogs and cats won't be categorized as farm animals :)

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  5. @Purba: And weirdly they are often named after the Country/ City of origin. I have a feeling we might do well here!

    @Jon: Absolutely!

    ReplyDelete
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