India records over 4,300 ‘black fungus’ deaths

More than 4,300 people have died from the deadly ‘black fungus’ in India in a growing epidemic that primarily affects Covid-19 patients.

India has reported 45,374 cases of the rare and dangerous infection, called mucormycosis, Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya said.

It affects the nose, eyes, and sometimes the brain, and typically strikes 12 to 18 days after recovery from Covid.

Almost half of those infected are still receiving treatment.

Doctors say the fungus is linked to the steroids used to treat Covid, and people with diabetes are particularly at risk.

Steroids reduce inflammation in the lungs for Covid-19 and appear to help stop some of the damage that can occur when the body’s immune system races to fight the coronavirus.

But they also reduce immunity and increase blood sugar in diabetic and non-diabetic patients with Covid-19.

It is believed that this drop in immunity could trigger cases of mucormycosis in people with diabetes or severely immunocompromised people, such as cancer patients or people with HIV / AIDS.

An antifungal injection is the only effective drug against the disease, doctors say.

The two most affected states are Maharashtra and Gujarat, where 1,785 people have died from mucormycosis.

Dr Raghuraj Hegde, a Bangalore-based ophthalmic surgeon who has treated a number of patients with mucormycosis, told the BBC there had been “a massive underestimation of cases and deaths” due to the disease .

“Usually, mucormycosis deaths occur weeks or even months after contracting the disease. Our current systems are not good at capturing this data,” he said.

The cases were also underestimated as diagnosis was difficult in small hospitals and rural areas and only a fraction of cases reached hospitals in large cities, he added.

Doctors said many patients died from the disease before they even reached hospital, and a number of treated and cured patients appeared to have relapsed.

“We are seeing patients who are aggressively treated for the disease and discharged from hospitals come back with a recurrent infection which manifests as a wider spread of the disease in the eyes or the brain,” said Dr Akshay Nair, an eye surgeon. based in Mumbai. BBC.

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