NEW DELHI, DEC 19: The Surat plague controversy has been revived by a former official of the World Health Organisation (WHO), who says the disease that killed 47 people in the city in October 1994 and caused economic losses worth $600 million to the panicked nation was not plague.Satnam Singh, a former programme director in the WHO office here, said that the same disease which occurred in 1994 continues to appear sporadically even now in Surat, following periodical flooding of the Tapti river, an evidence disproving the plague theory.However, Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, chairman of the committee that investigated the disease, says the renewed controversy is unfortunate as his panel had scientifically established it to be plague and ``world scientists have accepted it''. He adds he isn't aware of a similar disease occurring in Surat now and then. ``We have isolated the plague bacillus and the cultures are still available in the Gwalior laboratory if anybody wants to test,'' he asserts.Singh, who workedwith WHO for 21 years and is now the director of the Regional Institute of Public Health in Chandigarh, also refers to experts from abroad to buttress his claim. He notes that the strongest evidence of the disease not being plague came from the prestigious American Public Health Association, which has withdrawn the reference to the Surat plague from its latest report. While in the 16th edition of its Manual on Control of Communicable Diseases, the association had mentioned that ``an outbreak of primary pneumonic plague occurred in the city of Surat'' in 1994, this was deleted in the 17th edition.Singh also refers to a paper published in US Journal of Public Health Policy in 1997 which, he says, concludes that the Surat disease was not plague. This paper was authored by leading Indian scientists N S Deodher (a former director of the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in Calcutta), V J Yemule (director of Haffikine Institute in Mumbai) and Kalyan Banerjee (a former director of the NationalInstitute of Virology in Pune).Asked about this paper of the journal, Ramalingaswamy says it is not factually correct and that a rejoinder has been sent for publication.Singh, however, asserts that two more scientific reports disclaim the plague theory. One of them, by an expert committee appointed by the Gujarat government in 1995 under the chairmanship of N R Mehta, a retired professor of community medicine in Surat Medical College, found: ``A majority of the evidence does not support the initial suspected diagnosis of pneumonic plague.''On November 12, 1994 the 18th All India Conference of Indian Medical Microbiologists had declared in Pune that ``there is not even a single convincing evidence of plague either in Surat or Beed''.
