11 dead as India struggles with creeping paralysis outbreak linked to contaminated water

It was in early January that Awanti Naik's symptoms first crept up on her, starting with double vision and quickly followed by a debilitating headache and a strange feeling in her face. 

"There was heaviness in my jaw and eyes, and my throat was completely blocked," she said. "I was very much worried." 

She and her husband rushed to hospital where she spent 12 days in intensive care, attached to an IV for food since she couldn't speak or swallow. 

Naik, a public school teacher, said she tried to communicate with the doctors to find out if she would ever recover from her facial paralysis. 

"I thought, 'I don't want to live like this. I don't want to live with double vision,'" Naik, 40, told CBC News from her home in Pune, a city in India's western Maharashtra state, where she is slowly recovering.

She was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, or GBS, a rare autoimmune disorder in which the body's immune system attacks its nerves, causing muscle weakness and varying degrees of paralysis. 

Naik's is one of 212 confirmed cases of GBS in Pune as of Thursday, all part of an outbreak that continues to see new patients diagnosed in a city that has rapidly grown as it's become an education and information technology hub.

As of Thursday afternoon, 11 people there had died, two in the previous 48 hours, according to Pune city officials. 

More than a dozen patients are on ventilators, with 32 still in intensive care.

Once the nature of the outbreak was identified, local authorities worked quickly to free up beds at government hospitals and cover costs, said Dr. Ameet Dravid, an infectious disease specialist at the privately run Poona Hospital. 

But the initial days of the outbreak in early January, when many patients arrived at ERs with severe diarrhea and creeping paralysis, were filled with confusion. 

"From one GBS case a month per hospital, we were going to six a week" in each of the three hospitals within a confined area of Pune, said Dravid, who treated and monitored several of the patients.

"That was the first suspicion that something was wrong." 

Authorities analyzed bodily fluids from patients and traced the outbreak to a pathogen called campylobacter jejuni, which is a common cause of foodborne illness and is considered the main type of bacteria to cause GBS around the world.