After leading medical laboratories in the country failed to identify the cause of the mysterious death of 17 people, including 13 children, in a village in the Rajouri district, a high-level team from AIIMS Delhi visited the affected area under the leadership of its director Dr M Srinivas on Sunday.

The five-member team of experts from AIIMS Delhi spoke to 11 patients undergoing treatment and recorded their clinical history.

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As the cause of the deaths in Badhaal village remains unidentified, the AIIMS team is now trying to detect it by recording the clinical histories of those undergoing treatment. Three families suffered casualties due to the mysterious illness, and the AIIMS team is reportedly collecting samples from their sealed homes and the surrounding areas.

The members of the team include Dr A Shariff, professor in clinical toxicology, Dr Shailendra Kumar, additional professor, anaesthesia and critical care, Dr Jamahed Nayer, additional professor, emergency medicine, Dr Jagdish Prasad Meena, additional professor, paediatrics, and Dr Javed Qadri, assistant professor, clinical toxicology.

The team that visited the area earlier had detected toxins in the samples.

However, no new cases have been reported in the past nine days from Badhaal village, which was shaken by the mysterious death of 17 people between 7 December and 19 January, officials said.

An 11-member inter-ministerial team formed by Home Minister Amit Shah visited the village on 20 January to probe the ‘mysterious’ deaths.

To mitigate the situation and prevent further casualties, 87 families comprising 364 individuals were shifted from the village to three isolated centres in Rajouri — Government Nursing College, Government Boys Higher Secondary School, and Government Medical College — where they are under observation. As many as 808 households in 14 clusters were being monitored, Deputy Commissioner Abhishek Sharma said.

The team reportedly arrived in Rajouri on Friday night and interacted with the patients and their relatives at the Government Medical College, making enquiries about the entire situation. The samples would be tested to ascertain the cause of toxicity. The experts will also interact with other villagers during their stay in Rajouri.

The authorities had earlier imposed containment orders in the affected village to prevent further spread of the unidentified disease. Some patients were airlifted to the PGI at Chandigarh and many others were shifted to the Government Medical College in Jammu.

The J&K government, in a recent statement, said that these deaths were not caused by any communicable disease of bacterial or viral origin. Toxins have been identified in samples by CSIR-IITR. Pertinently, all samples tested negative for viral or bacteriological aetiology. The tests were conducted in some of the country’s most reputed laboratories, including the National Institute of Virology (Pune), National Centre for Disease Control (New Delhi), National Institute of Toxicology and Research (Lucknow), Defence Research Development Organisation (Gwalior), the Microbiology Department of PGIMER (Chandigarh), and the ICMR-Virus Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (GMC Jammu).