I would also like to thank Richa Kumar, Sinjini Mukherjee and my Soc Med class for their perceptive and thoughtful comments, and the editors at The India Forum for their discerning comments, deft and diligent editing, and for graciously seeing this through. I would like to thank him for his time and warmth and offer this, in part, as a tribute to him, and people like him and also to the vast mass of people who are out there right now, providing what are called “essential services” while the rest of us stay at home. I believe he passed away this February in Ghaziabad.
Mahendra Dutta, the central government’s appraisal officer for smallpox in Bihar, the above incident had all the ingredients of high dramaġ This account is based on my conversation with him in 1996, referenced here as Dutta (1996). In its retrospective personal rendering in 1996 by Dr. More were expected and scores would leave, many of whom would incubate the virus and show no immediate signs of the disease. The consequences were unnerving as the massive turnover of pilgrims implied the disease would be carried far and wide. It transpired that smallpox had made its appearance as early as the first of January and had gone unreported due to a doctors’ strike. Pawapuri drew to its Jain temple pilgrims from all over India.
It was Pawapuri near Nalanda and the occasion was the anniversary celebration of Mahavir.
But the site of his sudden confrontation with the disease was more the cause for alarm than the sizeable number of cases unearthed. As part of a specially assembled international health corps, his job was to unearth cases of smallpox in what was dubbed as the last major hot spot of smallpox in the world: Bihar. In April 1975, an American epidemiologist, attached to the smallpox eradication team in India, stumbled upon an impending disaster (Naraindas, 2003).
0 kommentar(er)
