As the spread of mosquito-borne diseases including dengue, malaria, encephalitis, Zika virus and chikungunya sees a sharp increase during the monsoon season, around seven thousand students from various schools took out a rally in Uttar Pradesh's Gorakhpur city to spread awareness about encephalitis earlier this week.
The children held placards generating awareness about encephalitis, a vector-borne disease, as they walked on city streets on Gorakhpur.
One of the students participating in the awareness campaign told news agency ANI that the main aim behind the initiative is to make people aware of how to fight against the encephalitis.
"The rally has been taken up to create awareness among people about mosquitoes and cleanliness so that people can keep themselves safe. We should keep our surroundings clean so that mosquitoes don't breed," the student named Soni Yadav was quoted as saying by ANI.
The District Magistrate K Vijayendra Pandian, who was also part of the awareness rally, said that the campaign of making people aware to fight against encephalitis will continue for a month in the city.
"This is the second phase of the rally which will continue for a month. The first phase of the campaign was conducted in April. A total of 7,000 students are participating. The school students were selected to do spread awareness because they are the most prone to this disease," K Vijayendra Pandian said.
"There is no permanent treatment for acute encephalitis syndrome and Japanese encephalitis, however, we can control it from spreading with the help of vaccination," he added.
Japanese Encephalitis is an acute inflammation (swelling) of the brain usually resulting from either a viral infection or due to the body's immune system mistakenly attacking brain tissue.
Japanese Encephalitis usually begins with fever and headache. The symptoms worsen rapidly that may result to seizures (fits), confusion, drowsiness, and loss of consciousness, and even coma.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in August this year said that deaths due to encephalitis in the state have gone down by 65 percent in the past two years.
"I started the battle against encephalitis in 1998. At that time there was an acute shortage of resources at Baba Raghav Das (BRD) Medical College in Gorakhpur but today the college has all the facilities. Due to sincere efforts of the state government, the death toll has now been reduced by 65 per cent during last two years," Yogi Adityanath said.
In 2017, the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in Uttar Pradesh had drawn flak over the death scores of children at the BRD hospital.
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