A doctor from the visiting team examines a child at the Karandighi hospital. (Nantu Dey)

Islampur, June 17: A three-year-old boy died in a village in North Dinajpur’s Domohona gram panchayat last night, becoming the 13 child in the area to be killed by a mystery fever since last Friday.

Today, two teams of doctors from Calcutta Medical College and North Bengal Medical College and Hospital toured the affected villages in the Karandighi block and the hospitals where some children have been admitted.

The chief medical officer of health, Shudhangshu Shekhar Sahu, said the cause of the deaths was yet to be ascertained. “The teams have collected blood samples which they will test. They will also send some to the School of Tropical Medicine in Calcutta,” Sahu said.

An assistant professor of the paediatrics department at NBMCH, Asok Kumar Bala, said: “We observed different kinds of symptoms. Not all of them are related to encephalitis (as suspected earlier). However, we must wait for the test results.”

The villagers are angry about the alleged apathy of the authorities.

“The government reacted after the media publicised the plight of our children, who have been dying like flies since Friday. There wasn’t a single health worker in sight and the parents of the sick children were forced to take them to quacks,” a villager said.

In Gopalpur, where Baskur Soren died last night, villagers were seen preparing for his funeral. Samsul Haq, one of those standing by, said he had sent his two sons and a daughter to his relatives’ place in South Dinajpur.

“We are living in terror,” he said and added that two more children from the village were admitted to the rural hospital in Karandighi today.

In neighbouring Murel village, a sub-centre for health has been built, but it is yet to start functioning. Most of the people of Murel eke out a living by binding bidis and there is a total lack of sanitation in the village.

Sources in the district health department said most of the children in these villages are not immunised. “How do we know what vaccination is to be taken at what age? Even during the panchayat polls, there was a measles outbreak and three children died,” said Haq in Goalpur.

The deputy director of health services, Shantanu Haldar, and Goalpokhar MLA Deepa Das Munshi visited the area today.

Das Munshi condemned the state of health services available to villagers in the area. “There is no facility to test blood at the Karandighi rural hospital and the doctors there are referring the children to the North Dinajpur district hospital in Raiganj,” she said.

The district health department sources said the doctors in Karandighi have been told not to go on leave.