Odisha has been hit by a disease called scrub typhus resulting in the death of 6 people. The latest scrub typhus death has been reported from Sundergarh district. Earlier, five people from Bargarh district had succumbed to the disease.
Since January, 132 scrub typhus positive cases have been detected in Sundergarh district, of which almost all people have been cured.
What Is Scrub Typhus?
Scub typhus is also referred to as bush typhus. A life-threatening infection caused by the bacteria Orientia tsutsugamushi, scrub typhus is transmitted to humans by bites from tiny infected mites.
The transmission to humans mostly occurs through the bites of chiggers, which are infected larval mites. Chiggers are also called berry bugs, bush-mites, red bugs or scrub-itch mites. The disease is predominently seen in the rural locales of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, China, Japan, India, and northern Australia.
Scrub Typhus: Signs and Symptoms
The Symptoms of scrub typhus typically begin within 10 days of being bitten. Here are some of the symptoms of the scrub typhus:
Fever and chills
Headache
Body aches and muscle pain
A dark, scab-like region at the site of the chigger bite (also known as eschar)
Mental changes, ranging from confusion to coma
Enlarged lymph nodes
Rashes
One-third of patients develop a severe disease that affects multiple organs in the body and leads to lethally low blood pressure.
Scrub Typhus: Diagnosis
In such cases where the doctor suspects that a patient has scrub typhus, the doctor will ask the patient to gets a blood test done to check for typhus bacteria especially if the patient has travelled to a suspected area. Since the blood test results may take some time, the doctor might advice starting an antibiotic treatment to be safe.
Scrub Typhus: Treatment
In March 2023, a team of Indian scientists has identified a significantly more effective treatment for severe scrub typhus. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), showed that treating patients with a combination of intravenous antibiotics doxycycline and azithromycin is more effective than the current monotherapy of using either drug alone.
The study found that when both azithromycin and doxycycline were administered together to patients with severe scrub typhus, the bacteria were cleared away quicker and patients improved faster. This could be because doxycycline and azithromycin stop the bacteria from producing proteins through different, but complementary, mechanisms.
Scrub typhus is a major public health threat in India, other South Asian countries and around the tropics and kills an estimated 10 per cent of the approximately one million people infected by it every year.
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