A CLINICAL STUDY OF ARTHROPOD LINKED DERMATOSES

Abstract

Introduction: Recently there has been increasing awareness about arthropod bites due to better understanding about these invertebrate animals, their life history, their breeding habits, geographical distribution, mechanism of trauma cause to human, animals, better understanding of immunological events that occur immediately after the arthropods bites or stings. There have been very few studies carried out throughout the world on arthropod dermatoses to see the prevalence of different types of arthropod associated with human society. In India, especially the north–east region, which lies near to the foot–hills of the Great Himalaya is also lagging behind in this aspect despite the fact that people living in this region are commonly facing hazardous effects of arthropods in their day to day life. In view of this, the current study has been undertaken to throw some light on prevalence of these invertebrate animals based upon clinical morphological pattern of the lesion.

Material & Methods: The clinical material comprised of randomly selected two hundred four (204) patients attending the Department of Dermatology in a tertiary care hospital in North East India with skin disease due to arthropod infestation comprising a total incidence of 1.70% of the OPD patients.

Results: The highest number of cases of arthropod dermatoses was observed in the 0-10 years age group (43.6%) and lowest was observed in more than 50 years (6.9%). Female patients constituted 54% of the study population and the rest 46% were male patients. Male to female ratio was 1 : 1.17.  The patients were sorted based on their occupational status as shown in Table 2 and it was evident that the highest cases of arthropod dermatoses were observed amongst the student (35.3%) followed by housewife (23%). It was observed that scabies was highest (52.9%), followed by pediculosis (17.1%), papular urticaria due to mosquito bite (6.9%), demodecisosis (5.4%), paederus dermatitis (5.4%), myiasis (4.4%), animal mite bite (3.4%), bug bite (1.5%), flea bite (1%), spider bite (1%), hornet sting (0.5%), dermatoses due to butterflies (0.5%).

Conclusion: Diseases which do not endanger a patient’s life are frequently ignored, but there is no doubt that even trivial lesions can assume serious upset if they are very numerous. Same is the case of arthropods. From this study an unequivocal impression can be drawn, that children and housewives belonging to poor socioeconomic condition with their different socio–cultural habit suffer from wide range of arthropod dermatoses. This study emphasizes the need for scrupulous and meticulous search for arthropod dermatoses and to set a proper protocol at the earliest to prevent the recurrence of the disease process and morbidity.