NEW DELHI, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- Local government authorities in Indian-controlled Kashmir have quarantined around 300 residents of a village after reporting 17 unknown cause deaths and 11 others are undergoing treatment at different hospitals, officials said Friday.
The unknown cause of illness began on Dec. 7, 2024, in the Budhal village of Rajouri district, about 243 km south of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir.
The decision to relocate the affected families and their extended relatives to the government facilities was taken after the local administration declared the village a containment zone, following five new cases in two days.
The houses of families where the deaths occurred have been sealed and entry inside them is strictly prohibited without permission from officials on duty.
Health officials struggling to unravel the illness have identified a common factor among all those who lost their lives as involvement of the brain and damage to the nervous system.
Meanwhile, a federal government team that visited the village to probe the deaths is continuing its investigation into the cause. Reports said the team had sent over 230 samples for testing to various institutes.
A local newspaper Dainik Jagran quoted federal junior minister Jitendra Singh saying the illness was due to cadmium toxin.
"Cadmium was detected in the bodies of the victims during the tests at the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research, Lucknow. How cadmium found its way inside the body is still a matter of investigation," Singh was quoted by the newspaper as saying.
However, he clarified no other virus, bacteria, or infection was found in the victims' samples.
The local government earlier said investigations and samples indicated that the incidents were not due to a communicable disease of bacterial or viral origin and that there is no public health angle. However, it said the toxicological analysis had detected toxins in multiple biological specimens. ■
