JAMMU: A five-year-old girl died and her five other siblings were admitted to a hospital after they fell seriously ill in a village in Jammu and Kashmir’s Rajouri district on Sunday, officials said.
The siblings belonged to Badhaal village of Kotranka sub-division where nine members of two different families had lost their lives due to a mysterious disease in December last year.
The officials said that six children of Mohammad Aslam were brought to community health centre Kandi for medical check-up on Saturday evening.
The children were initially referred to the Government Medical College (GMC) associated hospital in Rajouri town and later four of them were shifted to a hospital in Jammu where the girl breathed her last early Sunday, they said.
The officials said two of the siblings are under treatment in the isolation ward of GMC Rajouri, while three others have been admitted to GMC hospital Jammu.
Jammu GMC Principal Dr Ashutosh Gupta had last month revealed that preliminary investigations had pointed towards viral infection as the cause behind the mysterious deaths but said that more work needs to be done to reach the final conclusion.
Various teams of experts from Pune’s National Institute of Virology, PGI Chandigarh, AIIMS Delhi and the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Delhi, had also visited the village to assist in the investigations.
Meanwhile, Rajouri Deputy Commissioner Abhishek Sharma along with Rajouri-Poonch Range Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Tejinder Singh and Rajouri Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Gaurav Sikarwar visited Badhaal village to assess the ground situation.
Health teams have also been deputed to ensure necessary medical check-ups, the officials said.
