The farmer had lived a full life, so when he died of a viral fever at the age of 90, his relatives gathered to bid him goodbye. But 14 people suddenly took ill after returning from the funeral. Four of them — including his wife and a daughter-in-law — died within a few weeks.

The farmer, it was later diagnosed, suffered from a deadly disease which is widely prevalent in Africa as well as in some central Asian countries. The incident in village Karyana in Gujarat’s Amreli district took place last June.

The fever is eerily like the Ebola — which has killed 1165 people till Friday, mostly in West Africa, since an outbreak in June. The Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) — named after the regions from where it was first independently reported — has many similar symptoms, including high fever and bleeding. Last week, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak an international public health emergency. As of now, there is no reported case of Ebola fever in India as tests conducted on two suspected cases had negative results.

But health experts say that India should not be complacent because the virus has not entered the country. According to an epidemiologist, medical scientists are in the dark about the etiology of about 30 to 40 per cent of viral fevers — many of them involve fatalities — encountered in the country annually.

Take CCHF. The deaths in the Gujarat farmer’s family were diagnosed without any difficulty because physicians are now familiar with the symptoms — high fever, vomiting, blood-shot eyes, and bleeding through different orifices in the body. It is believed that the virus is carried by ticks.

The disease was first discovered in India in 2011 and diagnosed after it had already claimed several lives. Among the dead were four medical professionals who had come in contact with the blood and other body fluids of the patients before they knew that the disease spread through this route.

Significantly, apart from their symptoms, Ebola and CCHF share the same mode of transmission. Besides, like Ebola, CCHF too doesn’t have a cure, and it is mainly treated symptomatically.

“CCHF is a deadly disease and it causes high mortality. Medical practitioners, animal handlers and abattoir workers are particularly at risk,” says Devendra T. Mourya, who led the team that studied the outbreak. Mourya is the director of the Pune-headquartered National Institute of Virology (NIV).

That the disease had spread to three different districts of the state prompted the NIV scientists, along with state animal husbandry department officials, to screen livestock. “We were surprised to find antibodies to the CCHF virus in animal samples in all the 15 districts we screened,” Mourya says.

Now it seems to be spreading to other states. In April, doctors diagnosed CCHF in a patient in the Sirohi district of Rajasthan. “Hyalomma ticks, which act as a vector for the CCHF virus, are present across the country. We feel that this disease is probably prevalent in many areas and cases remain unidentified and unreported from other parts of the country,” says Mourya.

It is difficult to say when this infection first came to India; but, sequencing of complete genome of the virus isolates from the first outbreak, human serum samples and tick pools indicate a probable 33 years of ancestry, says the NIV director.

And that is why the fear about Ebola in India is not completely misplaced. Riding on ever expanding global travel and trade networks, pathogens are moving to newer geographical territories and mutating in such a manner that they can adapt to newer hosts.

A WHO 2012 report estimated that 75 per cent of newly emerging infectious diseases are caused by animal-borne (zoonotic) pathogens. India is said to be a “hotspot” for such zoonotic diseases. And that’s why disease surveillance is suddenly the buzzword in India. With financial support from the World Bank, India set up a nation-wide disease surveillance network a few years ago. The Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) with 776 centres in 35 states and Union territories seeks to detect outbreaks of as many as 40 types of diseases to minimise deaths.

“The idea behind IDSP is absolutely spot-on. The number of disease outbreaks being reported in the country has gone up from only 100 outbreaks a few years ago to 2000 to 3000 outbreaks annually now,” says Manish Kakkar of the New Delhi-based Public Health Foundation of India.

India, however, lacks standard operating procedures for conducting investigations, says Dr Shally Awasthi, president of Indian Clinical Epidemiology Network, a non-profit professional body of over 200 Indian epidemiologists, and professor of paediatrics at the King George’s Medical University in Lucknow.

“Whenever something abnormal is reported, it should be thoroughly investigated to see whether it is a new disease or a variant of a known disease. Whenever this cannot be done locally, a panel of experts from different relevant disciplines should be constituted to probe the outbreak so that rapid action can be initiated,” Dr Awasthi adds.

What about fears that the Ebola fever could become a public health threat in India?

“Ebola is a severe illness with a death rate of up to 90 per cent. We cannot deny the possible risk of getting a suspected case in India, considering so much of air travel happens these days,” Mourya says. “But it cannot be of very large numbers or in a very large area.”

Unlike deadly viruses in the influenza family, the Ebola virus does not spread very easily. “The infection spreads only through contact with body fluids of the infected person,” Kakkar points out.

But the fears of Ebola in India are not unfounded, because some 45,000 Indians are currently in Ebola-affected countries. Along with people, the experts point out, viruses too are known to travel. After all, who knew of the bird flu and the swine flu in India, even some years ago?