Andhra Pradesh, India – Over 450 hundred people have ben infected with an unidentified illness in a city in southeastern India, Eluru in in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
Local officials of India informed that over the weekend more than 300 people reached the hospital asking for help from this mysterious illness.
They consisted of a wide range of symptoms including seizures, loss of consciousness and some nausea over the weekend, according to Dolla Joshi Roy, the district surveillance officer of Eluru’s West Godavari District.
However, the country informed that there were 180 patients who appeared to be well by Monday and so they released them without any further inspections.
While one of the infected patient died from a cardiac arrest in the country, the officials informed that the patients death does not appear to be related to the mystery illness.
The mysterious illness comes in India while the country is already battling with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Being the world’s second-highest worst Covid-19 affected country, India has confirmed over 9.7 Million cases in the country. Out of these, over 800,000 confirmed cases comes from Andhra Pradesh, which is one of the worst-affected states in India.
Considering that the symptoms may be due to Covid-19, all patients who were infected for the mysterious illness were tested for Covid-19 and they all tested negative for COVID-19, according to CNN.
In addition to Covid-19 tests, the authorities have also done blood tests of the infected people to find evidence of another viral infection such as dengue fever or chikungunya, however, no disease appears to be the same as this new mysterious illness yet.
The cause is still unknown but still we are doing all kinds of testing, including testing food and milk
Roy stated.
As all of the infected patients had a common water source, the officials had also tested the water to see if it the cause of the new mysterious illness, however, the Health Minister of Andhra Pradesh state, Alla Kali Krishna Srinivas said that the tests that were conducted revealed that water contamination and air pollution is not the cause of this illness.
Further neurotoxic tests are currently being conducted in Eluru by several specialists who arrived from All India Institute of Medical Sciences and a neurologist from out of state. The results for all the tests are awaiting to figure out what caused this new illness and what can be done to prevent it.
