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Thailand’s other little
■ Just a few short months ago, hardly anybody had heard of coronavirus, let alone COVID-19. That’s no longer the case, of course. Today, this nasty virus is recognized around the world as a mass killer. Here in Thailand, thankfully, we’ve been spared the worst effects of the disease with a relatively small number of deaths (50+) compared to the US (61,656) and Spain (24,000) – and counting. For now at least, CVID-19 is less deadly than Thailand’s long list of other killer diseases - cancer, malaria, dengue, hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, Japanese encephalitis, rabies, leptospirosis, seasonal flu and HIV. But there’s another disease that few people know about – and yet it’s responsible for up to 2,800 30
TheBigChilli
deaths a year. Called melioidosis, it’s the country’s third most-deadly infectious disease after AIDS and tuberculosis. The number of fatalities could be even higher, according to some reports, because of a lack of information about the disease. Endemic to Thailand's northeast, particularly among farming communities, melioidosis is caused by a soil and water-dwelling bacteria found in tropical regions of the world. Some 40% of those infected die from the disease. But without proper diagnosis and antibiotics given on time, the mortality rate climbs to 90 percent. Symptoms range from mild such as fever, skin changes, pneumonia and abscesses to severe with inflammation of the brain and
joints. Dangerously low blood pressure can cause death. Personto-person or animal-to-human transmission is extremely rare. Symptoms of the disease vary considerably from patient to patient, which make diagnosis difficult. "Most of (those infected) die without knowing that they die of melioidosis. They die quickly," said Dr Limmathurotsakul Limmathurotsakul, the head of microbiology department at MORU Faculty of Tropical Medicine in Bangkok, in an interview with Al Jazeera. "When public awareness (of the disease) is zero, do you think any doctor will write on the death certificate that you die of this disease?" During the Vietnam War,
