Friday, June 1, 2018
A huge number of visitors from the developed countries while visiting India are suffering from acute diarrhea while staying in the country. What’s even worse is that many return to their country with life-long digestive tract damage including the stomach, according to a study carried on jointly by the gastroenterology department of Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGIMS), Dhaka Medical College, and International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, under the guidance of Prof Uday C Ghoshal.
“While most people dismiss the problem as a routine digestive tract infection, the impact can persist for life,” said Prof Ghoshal from SGPGIMS. He wrote the paper along with Dr M Masudar Rahman of Bangladesh.
The paper under evaluation for publication in the American Journal of Gastroenterology (a high-impact medical journal by the Nature publishing group), showed how severe diarrhea can make someone suffer through life. The researchers talked with 345 people, including tourists who had come to India and got infected with diarrhea.
To quote Prof Ghoshal, “We found that around 17% subjects suffered from post-infection dyspepsia—a condition marked by loss of appetite, nausea, and feeling of fullness and pain in upper abdomen. Likewise, around 7% of the subjects suffered from post-infection irritable bowel syndrome which caused cramps in the lower part of the abdomen and altered bowel habits.”
He further explained that these people suffered due to post-infection dyspepsia are a comparatively new disease. As a result, many general physicians are not conscious of the problem and end up implying different antibiotics on patients which aggravates their problem.
Tags: India, international visitors, Tourism
