A report on Japanese encephalitis in Mizoram: clinical investigation and diagnosis

Abstract

Japanese encephalitis (JE) is a leading cause of viral encephalitis in Asia. Mizoram does not have rec-ord of JE till now, however, mortality due to ‘viral encephalitis’ among 7 to 20 aged groups during pre-monsoon and post- monsoon season has been recorded. Pathologic studies of fatal human en-cephalitis caused many common findings. The clinical syndrome may include many neurological effects and many other similarities in the clinical presentations. Such neurologic disease may mani-fest as subtle changes resulting in an initial misdiagnosis. Several serological methods have been developed for investigation and diagnosis of the disease. However, reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) based methodologies have resulted in increased sensitivity for the detection of JEV viruses in clinical samples, and offers rapid and sensitive method.