LUCKNOW, Sept 5: The cries of wailing mothers filled hospital wards in northern India as the death toll from a Japanese encephalitis outbreak neared 480 on Monday. Doctors said much-awaited doses of vaccine had been delayed by a budget crunch, and when they finally arrived it was too late to launch an immediate inoculation drive.

“They have killed my son, my only son,” one mother, Sultana Khatun wept, pointing to doctors and nurses at Lucknow’s King George Medical College. Her boy Iqbal lay dead, covered with a white sheet.

“Some 300,000 vaccines arrived today but it is of no use as we cannot administer them to those already infected,” said K.P. Kushwaha, who heads the overcrowded paediatrics wing of the BRD Medical College in the worst-hit district of Gorakhpur.

Two more deaths occurred elsewhere in Uttar Pradesh state while a third died in Lucknow, the provincial capital, taking the state’s death toll to 478.

“There is no use administering these vaccines now,” a health ministry official said.

“We are going to save them up for a renewed health drive we plan to launch in November,” the official said, adding that most of 1,098 afflicted children were being treated in hospitals.

Doctors in Gorakhpur, the worst-hit District, worked non-stop to help 428 children in the government hospitals where seven more patients died, taking the toll in the district to 399 since the end of July.

Officials blamed the spread of the mosquito-borne disease on a shortage of state funds.

“The health budget is 1.06 billion rupees (23 million dollars) while vaccines would have cost the state over three billion rupees,” one official said.

The disease has spread across 25 districts in UP.—AFP