NEW DELHI — Tucked away in a small corner of India’s National Institute of Communicable Diseases are 100,000 mosquitoes, plague-hit rats, guinea worms and wild birds infected with Japanese Encephalitis. Better known as the “Mosquito Museum,” it is the oldest and largest such collection in South and Southeast Asia, formally set up in 1938 and still used in fighting killer disease outbreaks.
Scientists and researchers from all over the world come here to study these neatly catalogued insects, delicately pinned down in glass-topped wooden trays. Many of them have been responsible for millions of deaths across South-Southeast Asia.
Although many countries have similar collections, New Delhi has some of the oldest specimens in the world, along with the Natural History Museum in London.
“We are very proud of our insects,” said museum head V.K. Saxena. “It’s a goldmine for researchers.” The museum is a vital source of information for government planners who want to start development projects in unexplored areas.
Before they can start a project, government scientists collect samples of mosquitoes from the proposed development area and match with those kept at the museum to see if malaria, dengue and encephalitis-carrying mosquitoes are found in that new area.
Water samples are also collected to test types of bacteria present. If a disease-triggering mosquito is matched, the government is warned of the possible risks of going ahead with the project.
The museum is also a grim reminder of the region’s history of mosquito-born diseases.
In the 1930s, malaria was killing a million people and infected another 75 million every year across the vast, impoverished Indian landscape, says Nand Lal Kalra, a scientist who has worked in the field for more than three decades and earlier headed the museum.
India’s worst single epidemic was in 1918 when 30,000 people died in northern Amritsar district. More recently, there have been about 22 million cases and 10,000 deaths between 1993 and 2003, according to official data.
New mosquito-born diseases such as Japanese Encephalitis and dengue fever have also hit Asia’s third largest economy with 1.1 billion people, about 260 million of whom are poor. Between 1998 and 2004, encephalitis killed several hundred people a year. In the most recent outbreak, more than 900 people, mostly children, died of the brain fever in the densely populated state of Uttar Pradesh this year. In 1996, dengue killed 423 in New Delhi and infected 10,250.
Dengue and encephalitis are caused by viruses carried by mosquitoes, while malaria is caused by a tiny parasite called Plasmodium, of which there are four species that infect humans. The Plasmodium parasite uses mosquitoes and humans to complete its life-cycle. In people, the tiny parasite invades red-blood cells to reproduce, causing them to burst. “Mosquitoes have been the biggest killers in India,” said Kalra. The problem was more rampant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when India was ruled by the British and the disease was new, he added.
“Mosquitoes stopped their mighty armies, crippled their administration and killed millions. Soldiers would die, movement of troops became impossible. Laborers would die,” he said. “It was an endemic cycle of poverty, famine and epidemic. Growth stopped.” Development came to a halt as laborers died in thousands and region after region became virtual black holes — uninhabited and barren.
“Whether it was laying a railway line or building a factory, malaria destroyed everything,” Kalra said. In 1920, the British abandoned a massive river canal project for six years when malaria killed hundreds of laborers.
“The British realized that if they cannot control malaria, they cannot rule India. They even printed maps of the country based on areas of endemic outbreaks.” The first war on malaria was launched by the British in the 1930s. In 1947, Britain gave India its freedom, leaving behind its share of problems - including malaria.
Over the past five decades, an ambitious malaria eradication program has been run by the government but the country has been unable to wipe out the disease.
“Most health and sanitation services are restricted to urban areas while remote pockets are left out,” said Alok Mukhopadhyay, head of the Voluntary Health Association of India, the largest non-government health organization.
“Finances are also a problem and we have found that in most cases, money is diverted away from health programs.” By its own admission, India’s rural health infrastructure caters for only to 20 percent of people.
To help change this, the new communist-backed government which came to power last year, launched a National Rural Health Mission at a cost of 67 billion rupees ($1.5 billion) for the financial year ending March, 2006.
The project aims to set up district-level health centers to reach the last man in the vast rural wilderness.
But Kalra said it could already be too late. “Mosquitoes are also changing and adapting. Every species undergoes a change,” he said. And that includes the mosquito that carries the malaria parasite. “The malaria mosquito we saw 100 years ago belonged to one species. We could not see the 4-5 separate species or siblings of the same mosquito that we can see today. They were hidden in layers and have now surfaced,” he said.
