Of mice and men

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 the disease, Yersinia pestis, is known to be endemic to a few pockets in Marathwada (Gujarat and Maharashtra), the Kolar district (Karnataka), southern Andhra Pradesh, north Arcot district (Tamil Nadu), Tehri-Garhwal (Uttar Pradesh), Himachal Pradesh, Kashmir

Ignorling early warnings

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 of wild rodents conducted regularly in the '90s in Tamil 10 Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, considered to be plague-endemic arem often shown positive. Moreover, when entomologists Manoj Kumar Nayak Sehgal and V Baweja of Delhi University's zoology department studied

Comatose health institutions

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 and microbiologists poised to work out firefighting strategies. Calcutta, interestingly, which used to have a largish PSU with 120 employees, was left with 7, with 113 on deputation to other departments. Running to catch up with every

The return of a scourge

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.