Disturbed frontier

Restoration of degraded forests is the only way to curb monkey menace in Karnataka and to tackle the outbreaks of monkey fever in humans

- CHETAN H C, RAVI RAMALINGAM AND SAMARTHA P

THE COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the devastating impact of a zoonotic disease. While the way to avert such pandemics is to break the chain of transmission from wildlife to humans, such efforts do not always receive due attention nor are implemented with scientific rigour. One such zoonotic illness where spillover events appear to have increased, resulting in recurring outbreaks, is Kyasanur forest disease (KFD) or monkey fever. The illness, named after Kyasanur forest in the Western Ghats, where it originated, is a haemorrhagic fever borne by the tick, Haemaphysalis spinigera. It has a fatality rate of 3-5 per cent. Researchers believe that the disease was for centuries endemic to the forests of the Western Ghats, circulating silently among primates and ticks. It was first identified in 1957 after an outbreak in a Kyasanur forest village in Shivamogga district of Karnataka. Though outbreaks have remained largely confined to the area, the disease in the past few decades has begun to spread to other states, with Tamil Nadu and Kerala reporting KFD for the first time in 2013, followed by Goa in 2015 and Maharashtra in 2016. Today, India records 400-500 cases a year, as per a 2019 study published in the journal GeoHealth. What's worrying is that an article published in Reviews in Medical Virology in 2006 highlighted rising cases of KFD in Karnataka from January 1999 through January 2005, despite routine vaccination.