Mysterious virus causing crippling, months-long joint pain strikes Bangalore: Report

An unknown virus strain which causes nagging joint pain lasting for months is reported to have affected several people in Bangalore, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.

While doctors and virologists continue to be clueless about the nature or origin of the virus, more and more patients fall victims to this months long agony of joint pain.

The joint pain is normally preceded by fever. Several city hospitals have been reporting 10 to 20 such cases every day for the past few months, reports said.

Currently, the disease is diagnosed and treated as ‘viral arthritis’. Medical experts attribute the disease to a new viral strain.

People complaining joint pain are often advised to have a test for chikungunya virus.

However, the new crippling joint pain sufferers are all tested negative for the chikungunya. This is what puzzling doctors in Bangalore.

Some of these cases present with low fever, but the joint pain will be disabling.

Though the new mysterious virus affect both young ones and adults, children are recovering fast.

But those in the age-group of 20 to 30 years complain of nagging joint pain for nearly three months.

Usually, the disease develops as a small rash in some part of the body. Later on it becomes fever and severe joint pain. Swelling of the feet is also a very very common symptom.

People often present with by differing symptoms. in some cases a common fever, which usually subsides in three to four days or a week, lingers on and on.

Even after the fever is gone the joint infection continue to remain for months.

The viral attacks began in June and are continuing.

In 2005 chikungunya virus struck Bangalore.

Chikungunya virus (CHIK) is a member of the Alphavirus genus of the family Togaviridae. The alphaviruses consist of 30 species of arthropod-borne viruses, which are further subgrouped into seven serocomplexes based on serological data. CHIK was first isolated from the serum of a febrile patient during a dengue epidemic that occurred in the Newala district, Tanzania, in 1953.

Of late, it was reported that more than two dozen new infectious disease-causing bugs have emerged in india during the last 30 years.

Adding to this, several infectious diseases, which were considered as vanished years ago, have been re-emerging in India with more force, according to the health authorities in India.

Several disease causing strains of virus and bacteria are emerging in different parts of the country. And the pathogens which cause communicable diseases like tuberculosis (TB), malaria, cholera, chikunguya etc are either turning resistant to the available drugs or becoming more virulent.

India also fears outbreaks once-forgottten diseases like plague and leptospirosis in epidemic scale in future. India suffered disease outbreaks including pneumonic plague in Surat in 1994, leptospirosis in Kerala in 2002, SARS in Goa in 2003, anthrax in Mysore in 2004 and bird flu in West Bengal in 2008.