Neglected Communities

medical student reads about diphtheria and is tested on it extensively in multiple-choice questions, short answers and viva voce. I had never seen the disease and believed that I would possibly never see
it in this lifetime. Yet, on my first morning at Jan Swasthya Sahayog (JSS), Ganiyari, I woke up to the news that a child with diphtheria had been admitted at night. I masked up and there, lying in the isolation room, I saw a beautiful young girl, lying helpless on a bed with a neck so swollen that it has been apathetically named bull neck. I was excited to see the pseudomembrane in the oropharynx (Fig. 1), diphtheria’s cardinal manifestation. My initial excitement gave way to a sense of distress and sadness as I watched this child suffering from a deadly disease. A disease that existed in textbooks but was so forgotten that getting the right medications for diphtheria was a Herculean task.

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Neglected Communities