UP govt says JE, AES on decline, accuses Akhilesh of falsifying data

The Uttar Pradesh government said on Tuesday there is decline in Japanese Encephalitis (JE) and Acute Encephalitis Syndrom (AES) cases in the state, a day after Samajwadi Party supremo Akhilesh Yadav demanded a judicial probe into the death of children in Gorakhpur.

"In 2019, only 229 cases of JE came to the fore and 18 deaths were reported and 2,026 cases of AES came to the fore and 100 deaths were reported," UP government spokesman Sidharth Nath Singh told reporters here.

"Akhilesh is lying and giving false data of deaths. As compared to 2016, the deaths of children have come down by 65-70 per cent now," he said, adding that between 2017 and 2019, over 1.5 crore children were vaccinated.

Akhilesh had on Monday demanded a probe by a sitting Supreme Court or high court judge into the deaths of children in Gorakhpur Medical College due to "wrong medication".

Blood tests conducted on 1,800 children admitted to the hospital between January 2019 and October 2019 showed that they were suffering from encephalitis, but the government admitted only 500 such cases by "tweaking the records", he had told a press conference here.

Yadav alleged that acting at the behest of the government, the doctors there described their illness as acute fever and claimed that around 1,500 children had died there between January 2019 to October 2019.