A portion of the roof outside the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit of the Sri Krishna Medical College and Hospital in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district collapsed on Sunday, NDTV reported. There were no injuries.

Most of the deaths in the state’s ongoing encephalitis outbreak have occurred at this hospital. “A patch of plaster from the roof fell off, nobody has been injured,” the hospital’s Superintendent Sunil Kumar Shahi told ANI. “It is not inside any ward but around the verandah area. PICU is in between wards six-seven and but the patch fell between wards five and six.”

At least 139 people, mostly children, have died of Acute Encephalitis Syndrome in Bihar this year. Most of the deaths have occurred this month. The Centre has deployed eight advanced life support ambulances in the affected districts in the states along with a central team of 10 paediatricians and five paramedics. The Bihar government has ordered a socio-economic survey of more than 450 people whose children have either been affected by the disease or died.

On Thursday, the National Human Rights Commission issued notices to the Centre and states over the “deplorable public health infrastructure in the country”. The commission said it issued notices based on media reports of deaths across the country due to “deficiencies and inadequacies in the healthcare system”.

The symptoms of Acute Encephalitis Syndrome, which causes fatal inflammation of the brain, include fever, mental confusion, disorientation, delirium, or coma, and onset of seizures. The Japanese encephalitis virus is the most common cause of the syndrome in the country, causing 5% to 35% of the cases. But the syndrome is also caused by scrub typhus, dengue, mumps, measles, and the Nipah and Zika viruses.

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