Children frolicking in neighbourhood ponds in the summer months is a common sight in Kerala, a State that has an abundance of water bodies. The summer this year, however, took all the pleasure out of the water games for children when many young children fell prey to a rare but lethal infection of the central nervous system, amoebic meningoencephalitis, caused by free-living amoebae (FLA) found in freshwater, lakes, and rivers. Reassurances from public health experts that the infections were sporadic did nothing to ease public anxiety because of the frequency with which amoebic meningoencephalitis was being reported in the State from various districts.
Most of the affected were young children from 5–15. This picture changed dramatically in the month of August when, quite unusually, an all-adult case cluster of amoebic meningoencephalitis — eight cases in all — was reported from Thiruvananthapuram. But despite reporting an unusually high number of 19 cases of amoebic meningoencephalitis in five months, Kerala also managed to create medical history of sorts because it managed to save 14 out of the 19 cases, bringing down the mortality rate of amoebic encephalitis, from the global rate of 97% to 26%.
On September 12, all 10 persons who were undergoing treatment for amoebic encephalitis at Thiruvananthapuram Government Medical College hospital were discharged, having completed the 28-day treatment course of the State-adapted U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tr.