Encephalitis outbreak kills 400 in India

More than 400 people, mainly children, died in an outbreak of viral encephalitis in northern India, health officials said yesterday.
So far 2,300 patients have been admitted to a hospital in the affected Gorakhpur area of Uttar Pradesh state.
A doctor told the BBC that it was a "tragedy beyond imagination" with children dying every day.
Nearly 6,000 children have died of encephalitis in the hospital since the first case was detected in 1978.
Most of the deaths this year have happened since July, doctors say.
The disease occurs regularly during the monsoon in the Gorakhpur region bordering Nepal in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Until 2005, the majority of deaths were caused by Japanese encephalitis, caused by a mosquito-borne virus, doctors say.