At least 50 people, mostly children, have died from fever in Uttar Pradesh in the past week. [Source: BBC]
For more than a week now, children in some districts in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have been waking up with a high fever and drenched in sweat.
Many of them complained of joint pains, headaches, dehydration and nausea. In some cases, they reported rashes spreading across legs and arms.
At least 50 people, mostly children, have died of the fever, and several hundred have been admitted to hospital in six districts in the eastern part of the state. None of the dead tested positive for COVID-19.
At a time when India appears to be slowly recovering from a deadly second wave of coronavirus, the deaths in Uttar Pradesh have provoked a rash of panicky headlines about a “mystery fever” sweeping through the countryside of India’s most populous state.
Physicians in a few of the affected districts – Agra, Mathura, Mainpuri, Etah, Kasganj and Firozabad – believe dengue, a mosquito-borne viral infection, could be the main cause of deaths.
They say many of the patients were taken to hospital with a declining platelet – a blood component which helps form clots – count, which characterises a severe form of dengue.
Transmitted by female mosquitoes, dengue is mainly a tropical disease and has been circulating in India for hundreds of years. It is endemic in more than 100 countries, but some 70% of the cases are reported from Asia. There are four dengue viruses, and children are up to five times more likely to die during a second dengue infection than adults.
