The Hindu : Karnataka News : 22 cases of elephantiasis detected in Dakshina Kannada

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Monday, Dec 10, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka

22 cases of elephantiasis detected in Dakshina Kannada

Special Correspondent

This was in the first eleven months of the year

A drive was launched against the disease in November
It had limited success in areas under MCC

MANGALORE: As many as 22 cases of lymphatic filariasis, commonly called elephantiasis, were detected in Dakshina Kannada district in the first 11 months of this year.

District Health and Family Welfare Officer H. Jagannath said this in a function recently. He was inaugurating the ongoing fourteen-day rural sanitation programme in Belthangady taluk.

Blood test

He said more than 10,800 people were subjected to blood test in the period leading to detection of 22 cases.

He said DEC tablets were distributed to 13.31 lakh people out of the targeted 14.59 lakh people during the recent three-day drive from November 15 in the district to prevent the spread of the disease.

The achievement was 91 per cent, he said.

Limited success in city

He said the programme was a great success in Mangalore Rural, Bantwal and Puttur taluks, but limited in areas under the Mangalore City Corporation (MCC).

However, public health centres in the MCC jurisdiction were distributing the tablets, he said.

He urged those who had not taken the tablets to get them from the public health centres.

Transmission

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the disease is transmitted by mosquitoes that bite infected humans and pick up the microfilariae that develop, inside the mosquito, into the infective stage in a process that usually takes 7 to 21 days. The larvae then migrate to the mosquitoes’ biting mouth-parts, ready to enter the punctured skin following the mosquito bite, thus completing the cycle.

WHO says that because of its prevalence often in remote rural areas, on the one hand, and in disfavoured periurban and urban areas, on the other, lymphatic filariasis is primarily a disease of the poor. In the recent years, lymphatic filariasis has steadily increased because of the expansion of slums and poverty, especially in Africa and the Indian sub-continent.

As many filariasis patients are physically incapacitated, it is also a disease that prevents patients from having a normal working life.

The fight to eliminate lymphatic filariasis is also a fight against poverty.

Lymphatic filariasis has put at risk more than a billion people in more than 80 countries.

Over 120 million have already been affected by it, over 40 million of them are seriously incapacitated and disfigured by the disease.

One-third of the people infected with the disease live in India, another one-third are in Africa and most of the remainder are in South Asia, the Pacific and the Americas, according to WHO.

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