Over the last couple of weeks, we have been having patients
galore with fever of all types. Of course, most of them have already had
treatment elsewhere, especially with the quacks about whom you can read here.
The majority of them do not test positive for
anything except for a few who will have features suggestive of septicemia in
their blood picture. Very few of them show the malaria parasite in their smear
- and most of them who have a falciparum positive picture would have come
straight to us.
Over the last many years I know of this place –
there have been only two diagnosis – malaria or enteric fever. One of my
colleagues here has the following different diagnosis for all sorts of fever.
Malaria, probable malaria, chronic malaria, resistant malaria, recurrent
malaria etc. He does not believe that there can be any other diagnosis.
We are looking at the options of being part of
looking at the various causes of fever in this part of the country. Couple of
weeks ago we had an epidemic of fever of which couple of them had tested to be
CSF positive for bacterial meningitis. Almost all of them were only responding to either
erythromycin or azithromycin and we had assumed that H.influeza must have been
the cause.
I’m sure that if we do a study, we’ll find quite a number of new viruses
and there is high possibilities of finding leptospirosis. Dengue has already
been documented last year. Chikungunya has already been documented in our
nearby districts. We had one typical case in the OPD last week. However, unless
we do a systematic study we would not able to find the cause.
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