Encephalitis is a mosquito-borne viral disease, birds living near water bodies and pigs are its vectors. A person is diagnosed with encephalitis when the encephalitis virus is detected in the body; if the virus is not detected, it is termed as acute encephalitis syndrome.
Adult patients with encephalitis present with acute onset of fever, headache, confusion, and sometimes seizures. Younger children or infants may present irritability, poor appetite and fever. It can be caused by a bacterial infection, such as bacterial meningitis, spreading directly to the brain (primary encephalitis), or may be a complication of a current infectious disease syphilis
Though outbreak of the disease are common during monsoon in north Bengal and parts of Bihar, Assam and Uttar Pradesh, what has caused alarm this year is the spike in Japanese Encephalitis (JE), a more virulent strain, which has already killed three times as many as it did in 2013 and five times the number of deaths in 2012.