Department of Microbiology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
Abstracts of the papers presented at the XVIII National Conference of Indian Virological Society at Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India, December 11–13, 2008.
Dengue fever outbreaks were continuously being reported from India for last one decade. Re-emergence of Chikungunya was observed in South India in December 2005. We are here reporting a concomitant outbreak of both chikungunya and dengue virus infection from Haryana, North India. We investigated chikungunya and dengue virus infection in patients presenting with fever and joint pain from rural area of Haryana. Anti IgM antibodies against both chikungunya and dengue were tested by IgM capture ELISA in serum samples. Presence of chikungunya and dengue virus RNA was detected by RT-PCR in patients presenting with < 7 Days fever. We observed that, 33/51 (64.70%) and 7/51 (13.73%) samples were positive for chikungunya and dengue anti IgM antibody respectively. Six patients were positive for both chikungunya and dengue anti IgM antibody, hence showed co-infection. Chikungunya virus RNA was detected in 5/10 (50%) samples. Maximum positivity was seen among adults, predominantly females. To our knowledge this is first the report of concomitant outbreak of both chikungunya and dengue virus from India in the same population.
