The Hindu : National : Disease outbreak: team sent to U.P. village

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Oct 25, 2004

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National

Disease outbreak: team sent to U.P. village

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, OCT. 24. The Union Health Ministry has sent a team of experts to western Uttar Pradesh following reports of death of children there with symptoms of viral encephalitis. The Ministry has confirmed the death of 12 children, though according to agency reports from the area the toll has reached 48.

Ministry sources said the experts had been sent to a village in Baghpat, where most of the deaths had occurred.

The team included the Head of the Paediatrics Department in the Government-run Kalavathi Charan Hospital here and an expert from the National Institute of Virology in Pune.

Preliminary investigations indicated that the outbreak might be due to viral encephalitis. But, an accurate picture will emerge only when the serum and other samples collected by the experts were brought for analysis at the National Institute of Communicable Diseases here.

Agency reports from the field quoting district officials said that over 100 children with complaints of severe headache, fever and vomiting had so far been brought to health centres and government hospitals in Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Ghatmukteswar districts since the epidemic broke out a few days ago and that the numbers were continuing to increase. Deaths had been reported from Baghpat, Bulandshahar, Saharanpur, Noida and Ghaziabad.

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