Pune: Why a mysterious increase in GBS cases has health officials worried

In mid-January, a 50-year-old woman from Pune’s Kirkatwadi locality was admitted to the Poona Hospital and Medical Research with a numbness and tingling in her lower limbs that had progressed into paralysis.

Infectious disease expert Dr Ameet Dravid felt something was amiss when the woman’s husband told him that several residents in their township near Pune’s Sinhagad Road had suffered from diarrhoea a week earlier.

Soon after, three more residents from the township were hospitalised under Dravid’s care with the same symptoms: numbness and eventual paralysis.

All four patients were diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, or GBS, a rare auto-immune disease usually triggered by viral or bacterial infections. A test of the first patient’s stool sample detected a bacterial infection caused by the pathogen, campylobacter jejuni.

Campylobacter jejuni is a bacteria that spreads through contaminated water, raw milk or contaminated meat that is consumed uncooked.

Over the next two weeks, Pune recorded a surge in GBS patients.

Since early January, there have been 110 suspected cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome in the city. On Sunday, a patient who had travelled to Pune died in Solapur due to complications from breathing difficulties while being treated for the syndrome. Thirteen other patients are on ventilator support in Pune. Twenty of the total patients are children...

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