SRINAGAR: Authorities in India-administered Jammu and Kashmir were investigating a mysterious disease that has claimed the lives of 17 people, local media reports said Saturday.
The deaths, including those of 13 children, have occurred in the remote village of Badhaal in Jammu’s Rajouri area since early December.
The village was declared a containment zone earlier this week with around 230 people quarantined, the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency reported.
All of the fatalities had damage to the brain and nervous system, Amarjeet Singh Bhatia, who heads Rajouri’s government medical college, said.
“The winter vacations have also been canceled to deal with the medical alert situation,” PTI quoted Bhatia as saying.
The victims were members of three related families.
The federal government has launched an investigation with health minister Jitendra Singh saying an initial probe suggested the deaths were “not due to any infection, virus or bacteria but rather a toxin.”
“There is a long series of toxins being tested. I believe a solution will be found soon. Additionally, if there was any mischief or malicious activity, that is also being investigated,” PTI quoted Singh as saying.
In a separate medical incident, authorities in the western city of Pune recorded at least 73 cases of a rare nerve disorder.
Those infected with Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) include 26 women and 14 of the patients are on ventilator support, PTI quoted an official as saying.
In GBS, a person’s immune system attacks the peripheral nerves, according to the World Health Organization.
The syndrome can impact nerves that control muscle movement which may lead to muscle weakness, loss of sensation in the legs of arms and those infected can face trouble swallowing and breathing.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa: At least 242 million children in 85 countries had their schooling interrupted last year because of heatwaves, cyclones, flooding and other extreme weather, the United Nations Children’s Fund said in a new report Friday.
UNICEF said it amounted to one in seven school-going children across the world being kept out of class at some point in 2024 because of climate hazards.
The report also outlined how some countries saw hundreds of their schools destroyed by weather, with low-income nations in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa hit especially hard.
But other regions weren’t spared the extreme weather, as torrential rains and floods in Italy near the end of the year disrupted school for more than 900,000 children. Thousands had their classes halted after catastrophic flooding in Spain.
While southern Europe dealt with deadly floods and Asia and Africa had flooding and cyclones, heatwaves were “the predominant climate hazard shuttering schools last year,” UNICEF said, as the earth recorded its hottest year ever.
More than 118 million children had their schooling interrupted in April alone, UNICEF said, as large parts of the Middle East and Asia, from Gaza in the west to the Philippines in the southeast, experienced a sizzling weekslong heatwave with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).
“Children are more vulnerable to the impacts of weather-related crises, including stronger and more frequent heatwaves, storms, droughts and flooding,” UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell said in a statement. “Children’s bodies are uniquely vulnerable. They heat up faster, they sweat less efficiently, and cool down more slowly than adults. Children cannot concentrate in classrooms that offer no respite from sweltering heat, and they cannot get to school if the path is flooded, or if schools are washed away.”
Around 74 percent of the children affected in 2024 were in middle- and low-income countries, showing how climatic extremes continue to have a devastating impact in the poorest countries. Flooding ruined more than 400 schools in Pakistan in April. Afghanistan had heatwaves followed by severe flooding that destroyed over 110 schools in May, UNICEF said.
Months of drought in southern Africa exacerbated by the El Niño weather phenomenon threatened the schooling and futures of millions of children.
And the crises showed little sign of abating. The poor French territory of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean off Africa was left in ruins by Cyclone Chido in December and hit again by Tropical Storm Dikeledi this month, leaving children across the islands out of school for six weeks.
Cyclone Chido also destroyed more than 330 schools and three regional education departments in Mozambique on the African mainland, where access to education is already a deep problem.
UNICEF said the world’s schools and education systems “are largely ill-equipped” to deal with the effects of extreme weather.