The health department wants assistance from virologists in Columbia, the US, to check outbreak of encephalitis in Bihar, an annual menace that the state has failed to prevent.

Health minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey told The Telegraph that he has requested Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad to invite some virologists, including encephalitis experts, from Columbia to Bihar.

Choubey said: “Senior health officers of the state are in constant touch with a few Columbia-based encephalitis experts and virologists for their expert assistance in tackling the menace. They can identify the exact virus that has been infecting children mostly before and during monsoon.”

He added that scientists of Rajendra Memorial Research Institute, Patna, were also in touch with virologists from Bhopal to ascertain the virus variety. Choubey said a section of medical experts has advised the health department to collect brain tissues of the children suffering from the disease with the help of syringe for laboratory tests. Earlier, the doctors had collected brain tissues through operation.

The blood, serum and brain tissue samples collected by a team of doctors from the National Institute of Virology, Pune, had earlier tested negative. None of the samples had strains of encephalitis. The experts from the institute in Pune and National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme, New Delhi, had stayed in Muzaffarpur and Gaya for a fortnight in June following the outbreak of suspected acute encephalitis syndrome.

They also visited villages from where most cases with symptoms of encephalitis were reported. The mem- bers studied the cases of the ailing children.

Chief medical officer Gyan Bhushan said he is waiting for the findings of New Delhi-based National Disease Control Programme (NDCP). The six-member team of the NDCP, comprising its joint director Himanshu Chauhan, Sanjiv Saini, Ravi Shankar, Vijay Rajak, B.P. Thapar and Vinay Kumar, had toured the rural pockets of the district to collect samples. The team took wild rats, mosquitoes and flies for necessary laboratory tests.

Bhushan added that the health department is contemplating to rehabilitate the children who were afflicted with physical deformity during treatment. He said so far, 446 children affected with acute encephalitis syndrome have been admitted to Sri Krishna Medical College and Hospital, Kejriwal Maternity Clinic and other hospitals. Of them, 169 kids died during treatment, he said. The health department has identified 204 villages of the district vulnerable to acute encephalitis syndrome and efforts are on to sprinkle dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane to kill germs and mosquitoes.