Maya Rai, 38, is a tea garden worker in a pristine Darjeeling estate. Her days, which start at 4:30 a.m., are often a chaotic brew of cleaning, cooking, livestock care and readying her children for school. After a busy early morning, she walks to the tea garden to pluck leaves from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. As a daily wage earner, she toils for long hours for less than ₹300. After this she also must carry firewood for her hearth and fodder from the nearby forest and agricultural land for her cattle and goats. Maya, like most women in the region , cannot afford to stop working. For her, every febrile illness is ‘just another fever’. One monsoon, fever hit her hard. She assumed it would pass with some rest and a few home remedies, but soon, she was too weak to work. At the local Public Health Center (PHC), with no clear diagnosis, she was sent home with painkillers. But her condition did not improve. Fever persisted, along with cough, nausea, breathlessness and discomfort. Seven wage-less days later, she was taken to a private hospital in town, hours away from the village. There, a rapid test confirmed ‘scrub typhus’ , an infectious disease caused by a bacterium called Orientia tsutsugamushi. She was prescribed antibiotics and rest. Maya survived, unlike many others. Late diagnosis of scrub typhus often progresses to complications including acute respiratory distress, liver inflammation, kidney failure and multiorgan dysfunction syndrome (MODS). Although Maya missed her wages, she…This article was originally published on Mongabay
