Children of a lesser State

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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