A woman is suspected to have died of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) in Maharashtra on Wednesday, while 16 new cases of the rare nerve disorder were reported in the state, health officials said.
Meanwhile, in West Bengal too, three persons, including a child, have died due to suspected GBS in the past four days, though the state health department is yet to officially confirm the cause of the deaths.
On Sunday, a 40-year-old man from Solapur in Maharashtra had died of suspected GBS.
"A 56-year-old woman from Pune with co-morbidities is suspected to have succumbed to GBS at the state-run Sassoon General Hospital," a health department official said in Pune.
The health department said in a release, '127 suspected patients of GBS have been found so far, besides one more patient suspected to have succumbed to the disease. Nine of them are from outside Pune district.'
Sixteen new GBS cases were reported on Wednesday, it said.
Seventy-two case have been diagnosed as confirmed GBS cases and 20 patients are currently on ventilators, it said.
So far, 121 stool samples have been sent to the city-based National Institute of Virology (NIV), and all of them were tested for 'enteric virus panel'. Twenty-one samples tested positive for Norovirus while five stool samples tested positive for Campylobacter, the release said.
A total of 200 blood samples have been sent to the NIV. All samples have tested negative for Zika, dengue, chikungunya.
'A total of 144 water samples from different parts of the city have been sent for chemical and biological analysis to the Public Health Laboratory, and samples from eight water sources found contaminated,' it said.
In Bengal, all three persons died in government hospitals in Kolkata and Hooghly districts.
A senior health department official said, "The situation in West Bengal was absolutely under control and there was nothing to panic about."
The three deceased persons were Debkumar Sahu (10) of Jagaddal in North 24 Parganas district, Aritra Manal (17) from Amdanga in the same district and another 48-year-old man in Dhaniakhali village in Hooghly district, sources said.
Family members of the three claimed that they died of suspected GBS, an immunological nerve disorder.
Debkumar died at the BC Roy Hospital in Kolkata on January 26 while the teenager from Amdanga, who was undergoing treatment at the NRS Medical College and Hospital in the city, died the next day, they said.
The man from Hooghly district died on Wednesday in a hospital there.
"The hospital told us that the condition of Debkumar kept on deteriorating while being treated. They did not tell us that the cause of his death was GB syndrome, but in the death certificate the suspected GB syndrome was mentioned," the boy's uncle Govinda Sahu said.
Meanwhile, four more children suffering from suspected GB syndromes were undergoing treatment at the BC Roy Hospital and Institute of Child Health, sources said.
GBS is a rare condition that causes sudden numbness and muscle weakness, with symptoms including severe weakness in the limbs, loose motions, etc.
Bacterial and viral infections generally lead to GBS as they weaken the immunity of patients, and in the present case, the disease is suspected to have been triggered by contaminated water, according to doctors.
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