My Husband & Other Animals

by Janaki Lenin

The word ‘typhus’ comes from the Greek ‘typhos’, meaning ‘hazy,’ referring to the state of mind of the patient. The villain of the piece is Orientia tsutsugamushi (in Japanese, ‘tsutsuga’ means ‘small and dangerous’ and ‘mushi’ means ‘mite’), the parasite that causes scrub typhus. Written records of the disease date back to the 4th century in China and the early 1800s in Japan. Worrisome scientific reports say the disease is re-emerging in several countries, including India. Today, one billion people are exposed to the disease and one million are infected annually. According to the World Health Organization’s website, one can contract scrub typhus anywhere in the ‘tsutsugamushi triangle’ – from Pakistan in the west, to Japan in the east and the islands of Indonesia in the south. In mid-September 2011, scrub typhus outbreaks were reported in Nagaland and Himachal Pradesh. Three people died in the former and more than 13 in the latter. In all these years of visiting jungles around the country, we’ve always dismissed leeches and ticks as minor irritations. Anyone who fussed about getting bitten by them was clearly a novice or a wimp, and we had no patience for his complaints. None mentioned mites, maybe because you can’t see them. Before setting out for the jungle, if we remembered, we’d douse ourselves with insecticide. Ignorant of scrub typhus’ long history of debilitating humans, we were more concerned about the negative influences of chemicals than about diseases.