Rostov records 38 meningitis cases - Health Ministry
MOSCOW. June 14 (Interfax) - Russia's Health Ministry said on Friday that 38 children had been diagnosed with meningitis in Rostov-on-Don, and that two were in intensive care.
"Altogether 68 children are taking treatment in the hospital. Two of them are in intensive care. Their condition is stable. Thirty-eight of the patients have been confirmed as meningitis cases. Three children have been discharged in the last 24 hours and 20 have since the start of the outbreak," ministry spokesman Oleg Salagai told Interfax on Friday.
"Altogether 140 people have been affected since the start of the outbreak," he said.
The hotbed of the outbreak was the Teremok kindergarten, where a lot of children got seriously ill, one of them dying.
One more child, a two-year-old baby, has died, but the health minister of the Rostov region, Tatyana Bykovskaya, told Interfax that that fatality had nothing to do with the outbreak of meningitis.
Earlier, Russia's chief sanitary inspector, Gennady Onishchenko, said: "It has been established that the children have contracted the 71st-type virus of Chinese origin. It'll have to be found out how it got here," Onishchenko said.
