Head shaven in ritual mourning, Jetha Patel, a farmer in Varutha village, north of Modasa, says, “I had kissed her, tended to her at the Ahmedabad hospital. But when she was gone, the doctors asked me to wear gloves before touching her body.” His 13-year-old daughter, Daxa, succumbed to Hepatitis B on February 18. It is no solace to him that her death perplexes epidemiologists and taxes the state health machinery like no other case has in recent medical history. Experts say the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is endemic in many parts of China and other parts of Asia, but what now stalks Modasa is an unknown, mutated form of the virus, which seems to be killing and infecting people at will.

Modasa is a highway town in Gujarat’s tribal Sabarkantha district, with a history of communal riots and a still-unsolved bomb blast. This sleepy town of farmers and truckers is now living a page from a medical thriller.

From the time the outbreak was detected early this month till Friday evening, the blight has killed 53. Much of Modasa lives off the transport business, and its private medical fraternity off patients from neighbouring Rajasthan. But mysteriously, none of the dead so far belongs to the truckers’ community—know to be highly susceptible to HIV/AIDs—and there are no Rajasthani victims either.

Some 30 per cent of the town’s medical practice depends on Rajasthanis, says Dr Dinesh Patel, president of the local unit of the Indian Medical Association. But of the total number of people affected—171 so far—only one patient from Rajasthan has tested positive, and he has survived. Many infected people are in the isolation ward of Modasa’s lone grant-in-aid hospital, others are at the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital 100 km away. And all share a residential address within a 10-km radius of Modasa or have some clear Modasa connection.

... contd.