Hyderabad: Many city residents have been suffering from a range of symptoms that indicate a seasonal disease, but are testing negative for them. With dozens of such cases being reported each day at hospitals and clinics in the city, doctors too have been left stumped.
In one case, a 45-year-old patient had all the classic symptoms of dengue (high fever, rashes, drop in platelets) and overlapping symptoms of chikungunya (excessive body and joint aches).However, he tested negative for dengue, chikungunya, and malaria. His body aches have persisted for over a month.
The increase in such cases have left doctors suspecting mutations in unknown viruses. There are over 200 known viruses that can infect humans and many more unknown viruses in the environment with the potential to infect humans, they say.
“One reason why these viruses may not be detected is that they could be unknown and unidentified viruses in the environment which have mutated to be stronger than earlier. Although they are similar to the existing known viruses, they cannot be detected by tests for dengue or chikungunya since these tests pick up only specific viruses,” said Dr C Prabhu Kumar, Member of the Indian Medical Association (IMA), Telangana.
The other reason, doctors feel, could be that the viral load in the body is too little to be picked up by tests due to self-medication or antibiotic treatment. “If tested too early or too late, we can miss detecting the virus. Also, if some medication has already been taken, the virus levels may not be high enough to be detected,” said Dr Vinay Kumar Nandicoori, director of Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology (CCMB).
However, he added that in the case of dengue, even if the virus is not detected, the platelets may continue to go down for a while. “The very fact that a virus is not detected does not mean that there is no virus or that there is a new virus,” he said, adding that surveillance for newer viruses is ongoing by various agencies and hence there is no need to panic.
