What was the result of plague in Surat?
Answers
The 1994 plague in India was an outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague in south-central and western India from 26 August to 18 October 1994.[1] 693 suspected cases and 56 deaths were reported from the five affected Indian states as well as the Union Territory of Delhi. These cases were from Maharashtra (488 cases), Gujarat (77 cases), Karnataka (46 cases), Uttar Pradesh (10 cases), Madhya Pradesh (4 cases) and New Delhi (68 cases). There are no reports of cases being exported to other countries.
Causes
A committee under chairmanship of Professor Vulimiri Ramalingaswami was formed by the Government of India to investigate the plague episode. In 1995, the committee submitted the report "The Plague Epidemic of 1994" to the government of India. The report concluded that the disease was plague,[2][3] but did not identify the origin.[4]
Other sources identify the ultimate cause as the 1993 Latur earthquake,[5] which caused a large number of homes to be abandoned with food grains inside. This destabilised the population of domestic and wild rats (in which the plague is endemic), allowing transmission of the plague from wild rats to domestic rats to people.[6] The World Health Organization collected reports of excessive rat deaths in Malma in the Beed district of Maharashtra on 5 August 1994, followed by complaints of fleas. After three weeks, WHO received reports of suspected bubonic plague in Malma, followed by other villages and districts.[7]
Flooding in Surat, which had open sewers, put the bodies of many dead rats on the street, which residents probably came into contact with.[8] The Ganesh Chaturthi festival created crowds in the city shortly thereafter, promoting the spread of pneumonic plague, which was declared on 21 September.[7] By the end of the outbreak, an estimated 78% of confirmed cases were in the slums of Surat