A rare and deadly virus has sparked fear in Kerala after several deaths were reported due to high fever. Tests have found Nipah virus to be behind the cause of high fever, prompting the Kerala health department to be put on high alert. While 9 people have died of high fever in Kozhikode, only 2 have been confirmed to be due to Nipah virus.
Besides, Union Health Minister J P Nadda has also yesterday directed the Director of National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) to visit Kerala's Kozhikode district to assist the state government in the wake of deaths.
While any outbreak of an infectious disease creates fear among the public, the mystery behind Nipah virus has made it scarier. However, this is not the first time that outbreak of a disease is creating fear in India.
Here are 3 deadly outbreaks of infectious diseases in India in last few years:
2015 Dengue Outbreak:
With authorities failing to control adequate preventing measures, dengue outbreak has become an annual event with hundreds of lives being lost every year. The year 2015 was, however, was worst in recent memory with staggering 10,683 cases reported from Delhi alone. It claimed 41 lives in the national capital.
It the worst outbreak of the vector-borne disease in the national capital since 1996 when it claimed over 420 lives.
At the national level, nearly 100,000 cases and 220 deaths were confirmed in 2015.
Encephalitis:
In August 2017, Gorakhpur was at the centre of a controversy after it was reported that over 70 children who were suffering from encephalitis died due to lack of Oxygen. But it was not the first time that the disease had claimed so many lives of children. 26,686 cases of encephalitis were reported between 2010 in Uttar Pradesh alone and claimed over 4300 lives, according to a report by the Directorate of National Vector Borne Diseases Control Programme (NVBDCP).
According to a May 2017 report in Indian Journal of Medical Research, there have been more than 44,000 cases and nearly 6000 deaths from encephalitis in India, particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, between 2008 and 2014.
Swine Flu:
Swine Flu (H1N1) is one of the biggest pandemics in the world and takes hundreds of lives in India every year.
Following the 2009 pandemic of H1N1 Flu Virus, there have been several outbreaks of the virus in India with biggest ones coming in 2012-13, 2015 and 2017. In 2015, 39,000 cases of Swine Flu were reported in which over 2500 died. While the global death rate was 0.02% in 2009, the death rate in India is over 6%. In 2017, 22,186 cases of swine flu were reported till August with nearly 1,100 people succumbing to the disease.
