Physicians have almost forgotten what cholera is

CHENNAI: Having considered cholera as a disease that is past it’s prime is a malady that appears to have affected most Indian physicians today, according to Dr Balakrish Nair, Executive Director, Translation Health Science and Technology Institute. “It’s a pity that most physicians today have forgotten what cholera was about, especially in our country,” he said. After receiving the fourth Madras Diabetes Research Foundation Golden Oration Award, Dr Nair pointed out that there were still a lot of cholera cases being detected in the country, but most of it was not being recognised, “There is a tendency to dismiss diarrhoea, vomiting bouts or anything really, except cholera. Even when doctors attempt to tell parents that their children have cholera, they refuse to believe because they think cholera has been eradicated,” he added.While cholera incidences are high in Bengal and a few other regions, sporadic outburst of the disease have been reported closer to home. Three months ago, there were reportedly over 50 cases of patients with cholera-like symptoms from a colony in Poonamallee. However, even after the Communicable Diseases Hospital in Tondiarpet confirmed that it was indeed cholera, Corporation officials denied the same, “Government deniability is common. Most often they indirectly ask us not to announce publicly that it is cholera as it might trigger panic,” he also said. Despite extensive research conducted by Dr Nair and his fellow researchers, the union government still does not deem it mandatory to provide cholera vaccines for children, he added.Another interesting revelation that Dr Nair made was that the notion that common curd in India contained Probiotic bacteria or was ‘probiotic’ curd, is untrue. “In some tests that we did with children in Kolkata where we put 3,758 of them on Probiotic substances (1,894) and nutrients (1,864), we found that there was a 14 per cent reduction in diarrhoea in the former,” he said. Explaining the concept that Probiotic products contained species of bacteria that are believed to aid digestion and reduce diarrhoea by their action in the gut, he said that curd cannot make it beyond the acid barrier and hence, could not bring about this effect.  Only specially ‘additive’ based curd might help there.