By Bernama,
Astana : Kazakhstan has reacted to an outbreak of the enterovirus infection in China by reinforcing control on the border.
The republic’s Health Ministry has adopted a resolution “on intensification of anti-epidemiological measures on the state border at checkpoints through the Kazakh-Chinese border that is daily crossed by 2,000 people,” Kazakhstan’s chief sanitary doctor Anatoly Belonog, was quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying here.
According to the official, supervision at all airports, railway stations and automobile passage points has been intensified.
“Temperature of people suspected of having enterovirus is taken and their medical examination is conducted there,” he said.
Belonog noted that “in all planes and trains today there are the necessary equipment for taking samples, disinfectants and anti-plague suits.”
The official also said that epidemiological brigades have been created in the country, supplied with all the necessary equipment for disinfections measures in hotbeds of the disease.
No cases of people contracting the enterovirus infection have been registered in Kazakhstan so far.
According to Kazakh Health Minister Anatoly Dernovoi, one patient that has arrived at the Alakolsky district of Alma-Ata region from China has been examined and medics have not confirmed the suspected diagnosis “enterovirus infection” in him.
Since the beginning of the current year, enterovirus-71 (EV71) has affected over 27,500 people in China.
The epidemic affected a total of seven provinces. It killed 41 people. EV71 is the most dangerous for children under 10, and it causes the most serious complications in children under two years. Medics believe that the probability of the disease development in adults is low.
Enterovirus is the most common cause of aseptic meningitis and can cause serious disease especially in infants and the immunocompromised.
Human enteroviruses infect millions of people worldwide each year, resulting in a wide range of clinical outcomes ranging from unapparent infection to mild respiratory illness (common cold), hand, foot and mouth disease, acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, aseptic meningitis, myocarditis, severe neonatal sepsis-like disease, and acute flaccid paralysis.
Serologic studies have distinguished 66 human enterovirus serotypes on the basis of an antibody neutralisation test, and additional antigenic variants have been defined within several of the serotypes on the basis of reduced or nonreciprocal cross-neutralisation between prototype and variant strains.
On the basis of their pathogenesis in humans and experimental animals, the enteroviruses were originally classified into four groups, polioviruses, coxsackie A viruses (CA), coxsackie B viruses (CB), and echoviruses, but it was quickly realized that there were significant overlaps in the biological properties of viruses in the different groups. The more recently isolated enteroviruses have been named with a system of consecutive numbers: EV68, EV69, EV70, and EV71.