Change in clinical profile alerts docs

“Patients coming to us this year are more serious as their illness has become prolonged now. Till last year,the average stay of an encephalitis patient at the hospital used to be two week,but the recovery time has increased to three weeks this year. Symptoms like high fever and convulsions continue for three weeks now. Besides,children are coming with rashes all over their body and inflation of the heart,” said Dr KP Kushwaha,head of the Pediatrics Department at BRD Medical College.

Over the last few years,after Japanese Encephalitis (JE) cases started declining following regular vaccination,the clinical profile of the patients had remained almost the same; the only change has been a slight increase in the number of adult patients. This is for the first time that doctors have noticed major changes in the clinical profile of the patients.

“Rashes used to be there in some cases and even heart inflation,but it was very rare. Now more and more patients are coming with these complaints and we are observing and analysing the sitaution,” said Dr Kushwaha.

Denying any possibility of mutation in the virus,Dr MM Gore,senior scientist at National Institute of Virology,who is also in charge of the NIV field laboratory at Gorakhpur,said: “It is too early to come to any conclusion,because even doctors are still observing the clinical changes”.

He added: “As far as I have come to know,symptoms of JE patients remains the same and it is the other forms of encephalitis where doctors have observed changes in the clinical profile.”

The problem with the experts is that apart from the JE virus,the viruses affecting majority of the patients have not yet been identified. For this reason,all non-JE patients are grouped together in a category called acute encephalitis syndrome (AES). The lack of identification of AES viruses makes it difficult to ascertain the causes behind these clinical changes.

“It is too early to conclude anything. After the outbreak is over in the next few days,we will analyse the data. The treatment in the meantime will not be a problem because patients are given symptomatic treatment which can change with the change in the clinical profile,” said a health official.

So far,about 3,100 AES cases and 540 deaths have been registered in eastern Uttar Pradesh in the current year.