Mysterious disease: Women in Saeedabad suffering from contagious hiccups

Medical experts think the illness may be a psychological disorder.

HYDERABAD: The women of Saeedabad village have been suffering from a mysterious hiccupping disease for 12 years — with no permanent solution in sight.

This disease, which begins affecting the village’s women in April, is contagious. “One woman starts hiccupping and soon, all the woman around her start as well,” says Aasma.

She is one of the many women in the village who spends the summer hiccupping. “One girl in the village got the hiccups and soon after my aunt had them too. Within a couple of months, our whole neighbourhood was suffering from this disease.”

Even though some provincial health officials started working to cure their condition but most women complain that no one came to their rescue.

“No health official came to our help. We need medicine and proper treatment. Why try to fix the hiccups ourselves with whatever we can find,” says Habiba, another affected woman of the village.

Experts speculate

On March 14, 2010, a medical team led by EDO Mitiari visited the Saeedabad village and had four women admitted to the Civil Hospital, Hyderabad.

After 18 days, they were sent home. They were not cured. Maitiari Rural Health Centre’s medical superintendent Dr Akbar Jamali said hiccups were due to a respiratory disease, which was related to the village’s polluted environment. However, other doctors differ.

Civil hospital’s neurosurgeons Aftab Qureshi and Dr Rauf Memon and neuro physician Dr Sohail Khanzada after examining the women termed the hiccups a result of psychological anxiety.

Sir Cowasji Jehangir Institute of Psychiatry consultant Dr Kazi Humayun Rasheed suspects that the hiccupping fits are symptoms of conversion or dissociative disorder.

It is thought that these problems arise in response to difficulties in a patient’s life and anxiety is ‘converted’ into physical symptoms like numbness, fits, blindness and in this case, maybe hiccups.

These problems cannot be solved with medicine but with discussion with and therapy of these women.

‘More information, research needed’

Even though the winters lessen the hiccups, the women appeal to the government to devise a strategy to figure out what this disease is and to find a cure.

Shan Ali, a resident of the village, said health authorities should inform them of what relevant tests the women need to take, to find out what is the cause of the continuous and contagious hiccupping and to recommend a specialist so that something could be done about it.”

Hoping that they will get rid of the disease, the villagers pressed for medical research to find out the cause and cure.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th, 2011.