Advertisement

The year 2006 will go down as a year of diseases for India. It is an irony that even as we took massive strides in different areas of concern, mosquito-borne disease such as chikungunya and dengue and polio had the government run for cover. The year saw a total of 1650 people died due to mosquito-borne diseases, including dengue, in the country.

The panic spread when cases of chikungunya, a relatively unknown disease and one which had made an appearance 32 years back, resurfaced. What started sometime in 2005 reached a rather alarming figure in 2006. It was suspected that as of October 2006, there were as many as 1.3 million cases in 10 states across the country. The states that faced the brunt of attack were the Karnataka, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. It quickly spread to other states such as Rajasthan and Gujarat.

The other mosquito-borne disease, which caused havoc in public health, was Dengue. The menace was particularly glaring as New Delhi recorded the maximum number of cases (886). The other states that were close behind were Kerala (713), Gujarat (424), Rajasthan (326), West Bengal (314), Tamil Nadu (306) and Maharastra (226).

Though dengue and chikungunya were more talked about, the high number of polio cases took the country by surprise. More than 500 cases of polio were reported this year from across the country, 443 in Uttar Pradesh alone. Poor immunisation drive and filth particularly in Uttar Pradesh was responsible for the outbreak. It had claimed 24 lives.

By the end of 2006, 39.5 million people would be living with HIV/AIDS around the world, 5.7 million of them in India. Within two decades of being first detected in Chennai in 1986, HIV has spread rapidly within India, making it home to the highest number of HIV positive people in the world.

A cataclysmic situation never really arose but the fear of what might have happened was way too scary. That is to say the threat remained a threat.