A team from ICMR and AIIMS, Delhi has completed sample collection work on Friday and they will be sent to ICMR lab in Bhopal and AIIMS. File
| Photo Credit: The Hindu
Over 190 people from 12 villages of Shegaon taluka in Maharashtra’s Budhana district are gripped with a strange kind of hair loss condition that has resulted in baldness among children, men and women starting from the age of 4.
Experts from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said that the scientific term for this condition is anagen effluvium, a type of hair loss that occurs when hair in the growth phase is damaged. It’s a non-scarring form of alopecia.
Dr. Manoj Vasant Murhekar, Scientist and Director, ICMR-National Institute of Epidemiology, Chennai who has been visiting the villages for the past four days, said that a team from ICMR and All India Institute Of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi have completed sample collection work on Friday (January 17, 2025) and they will be sent to ICMR- National Institute for Research in Environmental Health (NIREH) lab in Bhopal and AIIMS Delhi. “It will take two weeks’ time for the reports to come.”
Samples are collected from over 155 people from all age groups, he said. “The tests done for fungal infection at the local medical college were negative. The dermatology teams from ICMR and AIIMS have collected samples of hair, blood, urine, water, biopsy, environmental and biological samples in the last four days. We have also taken a biopsy sample from the scalp of patients,” Dr. Murhekar said.
The patients neither have any common symptoms nor are they suffering from any health concerns such as fever or diarrhoea. They do not even use many products like shampoos or conditioners.
Three weeks ago, when extreme hair loss started to become common among many people, the villagers started calling the condition ‘baldness virus’.
Dr. Murhekar said, “This is not a virus. As per our observations, any patient who had hair fall in the first phase of the incident, are seen to have re-growth in the same area from where they lost hair, so this is a positive sign.”
Prataprao Jadhav, Union Minister of State for Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) and health said, “At least 12 villages are affected, and the cases are scattered and not from a single family. The water samples collected from all the natural water resources that the villagers use have come negative. Tonight, another team from AIIMS Nagpur is reaching Shegaon to inspect the matter. The research and science team want to investigate this peculiar condition from all angles as none of us have seen something like this before.”
All the affected persons come from lower economic strata and are mostly engaged in agriculture work. Health experts have appealed to people not to panic as this is not a contagious disease.
Dr Kailash Zine from Government Medical College, Buldhana said that the patients are given topical lotions, multivitamins and other anti-fungal agents to apply on the affected areas of their scalp. “The patients have symptoms of itchy scalp and when they scratch their scalp, they are losing tufts of hair. None of the patients are admitted as they can use the medications given to them at their home. The report received on January 11, 2025, revealed no traces of arsenic, lead, mercury or cadmium in the samples but elevated nitrate levels were found in 14 of the 31 samples tested.”
Dr. Sheela Godbole, Director ICMR-NITVAR, Pune, said that their team have just returned from their field visit to Buldhana and the matter is under investigation.
Published – January 18, 2025 08:01 am IST
