Bengaluru: State health department officials have issued an alert to districts on the Karnataka and Kerala border after a 7-year-old boy died of West Nile Fever in Kerala’s Malappuram region.
The alert has been issued to the districts of Mysuru, Chamrajnagar, Kodagu and Dakshina Kannada. Although the health officials said that there is no cause for panic as there have been no cases of the disease in the state, they have placed the border districts under observation as a preventive measure.
Reportedly, health officials have begun measures such as mosquito prevention and other control measures to mitigate the possibility of the disease’s spread. Joint Director of Communicable Diseases Dr Sajjan Shetty reportedly stated that the district health and family welfare officials have been instructed to screen patients with symptoms of acute encephalitis syndrome for the virus. He also stated that they have not yet received any directions from the Centre.
According to Wikipedia, the West Nile Fever is a viral infection typically spread by mosquitoes, which feed in infected birds. The virus doesn’t spread from person to person other than through mosquito bites, blood transfusions, organ transplants, or from mother to baby during pregnancy, delivery, or breastfeeding.
The known symptoms of West Nile Fever include vomiting, nausea, skin rashes, muscle pain, and swollen lymph nodes. Sever cases become West Nile meningitis or encephalitis. This is when the brain and its surrounding tissue swell, which results in stiffness of the neck, headache, convulsions, and paralysis.
As the disease is not common to this region, although there have been a few cases in the past, a team of experts from the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) visited Malappura, to investigate the disease in order to understand how to manage the same.
