This means the health department has to rethink its strategy of treating AES like encephalitis, through methods like fogging and spraying insecticides. AES, which is a vector-borne disease caused by mosquitoes, has claimed about 1,000 lives in the last two years.

Last year, NIV had collected serum samples of AES patients after several of them tested negative for Japanese encephalitis and the new virus was found unrecognisable. Reports of these samples have become available only recently.

Since the culprit is entero virus, the disease control

strategy should focus more on hygiene and consumption of clean drinking water, experts said.

“We have been notified by NIV scientists that there are more of enterovirus cases in AES. But, so far there are no new guidelines from the state government so we are continuing with the old strategy,” said Chief Medical Officer of Gorakhpur Dr RN Mishra.

Mishra said, this year, there have been 83 encephalitis cases in Gorakhpur and just two of them are JE positive, while the remaining are registered under AES. All the 16 deaths registered in Gorakhpur are of AES only.

A large number of samples have shown the presence of coxsackie virus, which is a member of enterovirus family. “There is presence of more than one entero-virus that we have found in the samples. We have communicated our findings to the Union health ministry and are also planning for its publication in any of the reputed medical journals,” said Dr MM Gore, Deputy Director, National Institute of Virology, Pune. Gore has been camping in Gorakhpur and studying the trends of the encephalitis virus in the area for the past many years.

Gore said: “Fogging and other control activities for prevention of vector-borne encephalitis should not stop, as there is still presence of mosquito carrying the viruses. At the same time, to prevent deaths and cases through these enteroviruses, there is need to spread awareness about personal hygiene.”