Medical personnel offer both good news and bad. They claim that this rise in the number of cases in itself is not surprising because in an encephalitis epidemic spread of the virus peaks in October and November, to finally begin subsiding by December. How comforting! The bad news: standard preventive measures, like blanket spraying to kill the vector mosquitoes, are proving to be dismally ineffective and the virus' radius of operations continues to expand to areas outside its traditional reach. If on Tuesday the state government's health bulletin pegged the number of affectedvillages at 337, just 24 hours later it had shot up to 403 (in 12 districts). And it is not just Andhra Pradesh. Over in Kurukshetra, district officials have professed helplessness in controlling a thus far localised epidemic.

Japanese encephalitis a pig virus which is often found in areas where paddy is cultivated, which can be passed on to humans by the Culex mosquito and which usually affects pre-teens -- knocks down its victims with brutal efficacy. Symptoms include high fever, varying degrees of unconsciousness and convulsions. Spraying and anti-larval measures, efforts to keep pigs away from human habitation and cleaning up pools of stagnant water are integral to controlling a brain fever epidemic. And there it is. Practically all epidemics, a never-ending litany of which calibrate the Indian calendar, point to the same offender: filth. Investment in vaccines and medical research are all very well indeed they are necessary but they will be in vain if initiatives are not undertaken to address theunhygienic environs that define urban and rural life alike.

Or else, we would just be facilitating the breeding of invisible, microscopic monsters whose identity we cannot even begin to fathom in advance. As happened with the plague epidemic in 1994 in India. As happened with the encephalitis virus earlier this year in Malaysia. When authorities there struggled to get a grip on what seemed like another outbreak of Japanese encephalitis, they soon enough found that they also had on their hands something quite novel, a virus akin to that carried by fruit bats in Australia, a virus relatively easier to transmit. As may have happened in the 1950s in Africa. A new book -- The River by Edward Hooper -- claims that trials of a polio vaccine could have inadvertently resulted in the spread of the AIDS virus. With global warming and shrinking natural habitats delivering an ever more dangerous cocktail of mutating virus and bacteria, humans have to curb their instinctive hospitality to these pathogens by cleaning uptheir act. Fast.