8-year-old boy dies of hepatitis-A in Kulgam , toll reaches 2

Kulgam, Dec 11: Following the hepatitis A outbreak in Turk Tachloo hamlet of Kulgam district in South Kashmir, an eight-year-old died from the illness at a hospital in Srinagar on Sunday morning.
Afnan Altaf (8) died of Hepatitis A at the paediatric hospital Bemina. He is the second kid who died of Hepatitis in the said village.
Health officials told Rising Kashmir that so far eight cases were tested positive among whom two kids have died.
“Four cases which have been tested positive for Hepatitis A are under the continuous observation of medical teams,” the official said.
Earlier, a five-year-old girl, Maira Gulzar died of hepatitis A, after battling for ten days in the JVC hospital at Srinagar.
Rafiq Ahmad Dhobi, Chief Medical Officer, Kulgam told Rising Kashmir, that unfortunately, the two kids died of hepatitis A at Turk Tachloo village of Kulgam.
“The kids who have developed symptoms, including the two who died, belong to a local school. We are looking for the reasons, and our teams are in the village to look into all the details,” he said, adding water samples, screening and testing are being conducted in the village.
“I have given instructions to the team and they will be testing all the kids of this school since the rest of the kids are doing well,” he added.
Bilal Mohideen, Deputy Commissioner Kulgam said, “The main source of drinking water to the place is Veshow and then it passes through a filtration plant which was tested. As such, we couldn’t find any issue with it.”
“The maximum positive cases have some way of linkage with a local school and health teams are asserting the proper details of it,” he said.
“If it would have been from a common source the diseases must have scattered, and at a large scale, we might have gotten many cases. But, the concentration of cases is around school,” he said.
“It isn’t necessarily that the disease is water borne, it can be due to contaminated food too,” he said.
The four-member team that was constituted by chief engineer Jal Shakti visited the area and took samples of drinking water.
An official said, as per the prima facie report, the physicochemical analysis of water is under the permissible parameter, and as such nothing was found unsafe in it. But, the biological standards report is yet to come.
Basharat Qayoom, Deputy Commissioner, Anantnag told Rising Kashmir that today a team of Medical College’s surveillance wing was deputed to the area along with the Additional Deputy Commissioner to take stock of the situation.
“The random samples were taken of around 129 individuals and all of them came negative,” he said.
All the medical and health teams are appealing to the people not to panic and general precaution like personal hygiene and taking boiled water is important in it, he said.Meanwhile, no positive case was reported today nor yesterday, he added. Ghulam Hasaan, the village head said, the teams of PHE and health have been here and it is very sad we have lost two kids in the village to disease outbreak.People here allege that unsafe water is the cause of outbreak,” he said.