“WON’T YOU give back my son alive?” These words, uttered in a video call with Kerala Health Minister Veena George on September 16, summed up the desperation of a young mother, who was in quarantine at a village in Kozhikode. Plugged into a life support system at a private hospital, her nine-year-old son was hovering between life and death after testing positive for the deadly Nipah virus. Already devastated by the loss of her husband to the virus on August 30, she was desperate to ensure her boy survived. On Friday, the boy recovered from the infection, bringing relief to his mother and scripting a feat for the medical world as one of the first globally recorded Nipah patients to make a recovery after being on ventilator support for a week. Along with the boy, his uncle and two other positive cases, who have been under treatment in Kozhikode, tested negative for the infection, taking the state out of the shadow of the virus for the fourth time in the past five years. This year, the state had six positive cases, of which four survived. At Aster MIMS Hospital in Kozhikode, where the boy was treated, the mother waited on Friday to embrace him. “I had left everything to God, who worked through the doctors. I feared the worst… I cried before the minister in the video call to get my son back. After he was removed from the ventilator last week, doctors at the hospital connected him to me through video call. I saw that he was recovering,” she said. In the fourth outbreak of the zoonotic disease in Kerala, the boy’s 47-year-old father from Maruthonkara panchayat in Kozhikode was the index case. An expat living in the Middle East, he had been on a long leave to look after his indisposed father. Unbeknown to the medical world that the deadly virus had infected him, the man died with symptoms of pneumonia on August 30. On September 9, his son and a 25-year-old relative got admitted at Aster MIMS hospital in a critical condition. Two days later, a 40-year-old person from a nearby village got admitted at the same hospital with viral pneumonia but died of cardiac arrest in the emergency department. The probe into the two unrelated deaths with the same symptoms led to suspicion about a cluster formation. Lab tests confirmed the presence of the virus on September 12. Over the past two weeks, while her son battled for his life at the Kozhikode hospital, the woman remained in quarantine at her village along with her four-year-old daughter. “Every day, local health workers and panchayat authorities looked after me while I was in quarantine. They attended to all my needs. Doctors called me every day, providing mental support,” she recalled. Aster MIMS North Kerala cluster director (critical care) Dr A S Anoopkumar said it is rare that a Nipah-infected person lives after being on ventilator. “We haven’t seen such a case reported in any medical journal. This is very rare in the medical world.” Dr Anoopkumar, who was instrumental in diagnosing the virus this time as well as in 2018 in the state, said: “In 2018, five patients whom we were treating died. That failure pained me as a doctor despite realising the high mortality rate of the infection. But the civic society stood with the medical fraternity after understanding the limitations of medical science. That approach of the public had given us confidence.” “In 2023, the outbreak could be contained right from the beginning due to accurate and timely diagnosis and collective efforts to prevent the spread. This period has given me the realisation that social responsibility and humanity should be kept close to the heart beyond the walls of the ICU,” he said. Health Minister George, who reviewed the situation in Kozhikode, said diagnosis of the index case was a major achievement. “The speedy diagnosis helped prevent a second wave. There was a collective effort behind containing the outbreak,” she said. The virus reported in Kerala belonged to a Bangladeshi strain, which is known for a mortality rate - even up to 90 per cent, she said. “This year, of the six cases reported in Kozhikode, we lost two lives, putting the death rate at 33.3 per cent. Early detection and use of antiviral medicines for treatment might have helped us bring down the mortality rate,” she said.
