Teams of doctors with vaccines and mosquito nets have rushed to the worst-hit areas in Northern India to control the spread of Japanese encephalitis.

There was some respite in Nepal where 204 people have died from the disease since April. But there was no sign of the disease's spread abating in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh where 696 people, most of them children under 15, have died since July, said OP Singh, the state's director-general of health. Nepal neighbors India's Uttar Pradesh state.

At King George's Medical University hospital in Lucknow, the state capital, Sumit Kumar, a 3-year-old boy, was in lying in a coma, hooked to an oxygen mask and a nasal feeding tube for the seventh straight day Wednesday, his family said.

There was no saline solution left in a bottle intravenously connected to the boy, and his father, Ram Adahar, complained, "I have told the nurse to replace the saline bottle. It's almost an hour, but no one is listening to us.

"He is a chirpy boy who never sits idle," said Adahar, who sold part of his farm to pay the medical bills. "But he hasn't spoken to us for the past seven days."

Battling for Survival

Sumit is among 40 children battling for survival at King George's hospital. All of them are suffering from encephalitis, which causes high fever and pain. If not treated quickly, the patients slip into coma and die.

The disease broke out in Gorakhpur, a town 250 kilometers (155 miles) southeast of the state capital and later spread to 25 of 70 districts of the state.

It has sickened more than 3,200 people, out of which 1,026 have been hospitalized across Uttar Pradesh.

KP Kushwaha, a pediatrician at BRD Medical College in Gorakhpur, said over 570 children have died in the town alone.

"We have the figures of the state-run hospitals, we do not know how many children have died in private hospitals and in villages without medicines," he told The Associated Press from Gorakhpur in a telephone interview.

Short of Vaccine

On Monday, federal health authorities said more than 20 million children across 60 districts in northern India, where Japanese encephalitis is considered endemic, would be vaccinated against the disease. The government also planned to step up aerial spraying to kill the mosquitoes spreading the disease.

In Nepal, the outbreak of the disease has sickened more than 1,200 since April, Assistant Health Minister Nikshya Sumshere Rana said Tuesday.

Teams of doctors with vaccines and mosquito nets have rushed to the worst-hit areas to control the spread of the disease, Rana said.

The mosquito-borne virus can be checked by vaccinations, but Rana said the impoverished Himalayan kingdom is short of vaccine and is trying to import it from neighboring China.