The return of the dread

Nipah’s deadly shadow returns to Malappuram, sparking a frantic race against time to contain the virus.

Sulaiman, a headload worker at Valanchery, had never missed the Workers’ Day celebrations in over 20 years. But this May Day was different.

Instead of joining his co-workers, Sulaiman rushed his 42-year-old wife to clinics and hospitals, her health faltering with each passing moment. By midnight, she lay critically ill in the emergency wing of the EMS Memorial Cooperative Hospital at Perinthalmanna.

In the early hours of May 2, in the intensive care unit (ICU)‘s sterile silence, she slipped into a coma. Her loved ones’ world began shrinking to a terrifying reality as Sulaiman and their three children waited in frozen worry.

Their house at Thaniyappankunnu in Valanchery municipality stood still and silent, its doors locked since that fateful day. In the portico, two plastic chairs sat dusty and abandoned. Washed clothes flapped gently on a clothesline beneath a tarpaulin while Sulaiman’s Hero bike lay idle behind the house. The 15-cent compound remained untouched. The locked house and its eerie compound provided a poignant reminder of life paused.

Nine wards within a three-kilometre radius of their house, encompassing areas of Valanchery municipality and the neighbouring panchayats of Marakkara, Edayur, and Athavanad, were declared containment zones on May 8, the day the woman tested positive for the deadly Nipah virus.

The State Health department sprang into action with Minister for Health Veena George herself rushing to Malappuram to formally announce the confirmation of the Nipah case.

Within 10 months since July last year, Malappuram reported three Nipah cases. A 14-year-old schoolboy succumbed to Nipah at Chembrassery, near Pandikkad, in July last year, followed by the death of a 24-year-old man from Naduvath, near Wandoor, in September. The Valanchery woman, the latest Nipah patient, fights for her life in the ICU with encephalitis having plunged her into a coma.