Posted on 12/02/2002 2:05:00 AM PST by chance33_98
Mysterious disease takes toll of up to 100 in India's Uttar
Pradesh
New Delhi, Dec 2, IRNA -- India's Chief Minister Mayawati had to send one of her ministers to find out the facts regarding the reported cases of children's death because of a mysterious disease, which is believed to have caused the deaths of more than 100 children in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
According to the Pioneer, a New Delhi-based English daily, doctors are, however, still unable to find the root cause and possible treatment for the disease.
Reports of children who have died because of a mysterious disease in Sharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat and Meerut districts have been pouring in since last week.
The disease, for want of a medical name, is called fever of the brain in the said localities.
Those afflicted suffer from high fever in the beginning which becomes uncontrollable within a very short period.
Those afflicted become unconscious in a very short period of time and no medicines to treat high fever work on them. Those who get the disease die within 48 hours.
Doctors of the area, including doctors of government hospitals, took the disease as malaria in the beginning.
However, very soon they realized that it could not be malaria but some other disease. People of the area have started taking their sick children to Delhi for treatment after seeing that local doctors have not been able to treat them.
Senior government doctors have also tried to hush up the matter, admitting that some cases of death have been reported but denying the existence of any mysterious disease in the region.
A team from the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) in Delhi reached Saharanpur on Friday to study the causes of the deaths. More than 80 children suspected of having contracted the disease have died in this district alone.
The doctors told the minister that although the cause of the disease is still not confirmed, the carrier could be a virus which thrives in pigs and reaches the human body through mosquitoes.
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