Children of a lesser State
In the rural heartland of eastern Uttar Pradesh (up), it is difficult to find that criminal called Japanese encephalitis (je). je is transmitted from infected pigs to humans by mosquitoes. So I decided to track down villages with piggeries (pig-keeping is a survival profession here). Travelling from Gorakhpur city to Sardar Nagar block, I found villages with pigpens but no reported je cases. There were villages with je cases that had no pigs. No village I went to had reported more than two cases of je, called mastishk jvar (brain fever).
Perfect name: it signifies the nature of this rare disease. Most people develop immunity to the je virus naturally after catching the infection from a carrier mosquito. But not all. In the