The death of an Anna University student at Government Kilpauk Medical College Hospital (KMCH) on Friday (September 18, 2026), due to scrub typhus, has once again brought this bacterial infection to the fore.
University authorities have said they have started screening students for scrub typhus as well, along with dengue and leptospirosis
Scrub typhus is a bacterial infection caused by the bacterium Orientia tsutsugamushi . It is spread by the bite of infected larval mites or chiggers — it is not a mosquito-borne disease. Scrub typhus is a major public health burden in South and Southeast Asia. The review also noted that the disease causes severe morbidity and accounts for a large number of deaths, with its bueden “underappreciated. The United States Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists symptoms of scrub typhus as: fever and chills, headache, body aches and muscle pain, a dark, scab-like region at the site of the chigger bite (also known as eschar), mental changes ranging from confusion to coma, enlarged lymph nodes and a rash. Timely treatment is critical. Scrub typhus should be treated with the antibiotics doxycycline or azithromycin. If the treatment is begun in time, it is effective. The frequencies of respiratory, renal, hepatic, and central nervous system complications were lower in the combination-therapy group than in either of the monotherapy groups. There is no vaccine as yet for scrub typhus. The infection is not contagious.
A 2021 systematic review noted that scrub typhus, a common acute febrile illness, is “a grossly under-recognised public health problem in India. It stated that the proportion of scrub typhus among acute undifferentiated febrile illness (AUFI) studies was 25.3%, and community seroprevalence was 34.2%. A 2025 multi-centre study of 587 children with acute encephalitis syndrome (AES) from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu revealed that scrub typhus is now the most common infectious cause of AES in southern India. Symptoms usually begin within 10 days of infection. Results of a trial carried out in seven centres in India, published in 2023 , in which patients were randomly assigned to receive a combination therapy of doxycycline and azithromycin, showed faster resolution of complications compared with two other arms where patients were given monotherapy with either doxycycline or azithromycin.
If left untreated, severe illness from scrub typhus infection can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), shock, meningitis and kidney failure, which can be fatal, notes a research paper, Incidence of Scrub Typhus in Rural South India published in The New England Journal of Medicine last year.
