NEW DELHI // The Indian government is stepping up its efforts to combat a wave of swine flu, which has killed 631 people since the beginning of the year, including 100 in the past week.
On Tuesday, JP Nadda, India’s health minister, held an urgent review meeting to tackle the spread of the disease and to deal with reports that pharmacies across the country are running short of medicines.
Government statistics show that 9,311 cases of infection have been reported since January 1, making it the worst outbreak of swine flu in five years. In 2009-10, nearly 50,000 people were infected, and more than 2,700 people died.
The health ministry’s top official tackling this outbreak, P Ravindran, has himself just returned from sick leave, having caught swine flu while on a tour of Gujarat two weeks ago.
Although cases are being reported across India, the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh have registered the highest number of deaths. Rajasthan alone accounts for roughly a quarter of the casualties this year.
Supplies of the two main drugs used to treat swine flu — Oseltamivir and Tamiflu — have run low, according to media reports. On Tuesday, the Drug Controller General of India instructed 10,000 licensed pharmacies across India to increase their stocks of the drugs.
“We’ve asked companies to airlift stocks, if required,” BP Sharma, the health secretary, said on Tuesday. “We will monitor availability in the retail market.” The health ministry has also asked states to distribute protective kits to health workers and to order more diagnostic kits that can test for the H1N1 virus.
The swine flu virus is harboured in pigs but transmitted through the inhalation of contaminated droplets of moisture or through contact with a contaminated surface and a person’s eyes, nose or mouth.
Symptoms, which develop after one to three days, are easily confused with those of ordinary flu. They include fever, a cough and a runny nose, headache, fatigue and vomiting; in later stages, a marked breathlessness sets in as well.
Government hospitals test for swine flu free of charge, but high demand for the exam has prolonged the wait for results. The wait now runs between three to eight days, said Manav Manchanda, a specialist in respiratory ailments at the Asian Institute of Medical Science in Faridabad.
“What happens in such scenarios is that the patient may have already become better, if he doesn’t have swine flu — and if he does, he would have gotten into a serious condition,” Dr Manchanda said.
Some states are handicapped because they don’t have enough testing centres.
The city of Nagpur, with a population of two million people, has only one government hospital equipped to conduct swine flu testing. In the whole state of Himachal Pradesh, only the Indira Gandhi Medical College & Hospital has a swine flu testing machine.
Private laboratories, which offer results within a day, charge between 2,000 and 9,000 rupees (Dh118-Dh531) for a single test.
Sonal Nerurkar, a 42-year-old journalist in Delhi, went a week with a cough and a sore throat before seeing a doctor on Monday. She had read about swine flu cases that were presenting without fever, she said, so she asked the doctor o whether she should be tested for the disease.
“Somebody I knew had swine flu, which is what set me off,” Ms Nerurkar said.
In the Delhi suburb of Faridabad, where Ms Nerurkar lives, only one private laboratory is equipped to test for swine flu. The lab sent a technician to Ms Nerurkar’s house to swab her nose and throat for samples.
The test cost Ms Nerurkar 5,000 rupees, but it came back negative. “If I had been diagnosed positive, everybody I’ve been in contact with would have had to take Tamiflu,” she said.
Ordinarily, the incidence of swine flu cases rises in the winter and then gradually drops off as summer sets in across the country, said Dr Manchanda.
Last year, the number of reported cases was relatively low — only 937 from across the country. For that reason, Dr Manchanda said, “the medical community and the government might have thought that we won’t have this kind of severe outbreak again.”
But the virus also seems to be behaving differently, he added. As Ms Nerurkar had pointed out, many swine flu cases this year do not show fever as a symptom.
“Also, it seems to be spreading faster this year, even though the weather is warming up,” Dr Manchanda said. “It may be a different strain, but until microbiologists can study it, there’s no way to tell for sure.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae