Komang Kari from Udyana Univeristy School of Medicine in Bali, Indonesia, and colleagues from other institutions in Bali, Korea and Thailand studied 239 Balinese children who reported to health centres or clinics with symptoms similar to those of Japanese encephalitis, between July 2001 and December 2003.
Kari et al. confirmed that 86 out of the 239 children had Japanese encephalitis and that a further four children probably had the disease – the virus was only detected in their serum and not in their cerebrospinal fluid. Of these 90 children, only one was over 10 years old. Of the children with confirmed Japanese encephalitis, nine died and 31 were left with serious neurological disability. The authors conclude that the annual incidence rate for children under 10 is 8.2 per 100,000.
Article:
A hospital-based surveillance for Japanese encephalitis in Bali, Indonesia
Komang Kari, Wei Liu, Kompiang Gautama, Mammen P. Mammen Jr., John D. Clemens, Ananda Nisalak, Ketut Subrata, Hyei Kyung Kim and Zhi-Yi Xu
BMC Medicine (in press)
Journal
BMC Medicine