Govt issues travel advisory after swine-flu alert

NI Wire

New Delhi

Mon, 27 Apr 2009: 

In the wake of deadly swine flu outbreak in Mexico and US and the unconfirmed reports of spreading its tentacles in Asia, the Indian government issued travel advisory on Monday asking its people to avoid travelling to European and American countries, particularly, US, Mexico, Canada and France.

The Unionealth Ministry conducted a high-level meeting accompanied by experts from National Institute of Communicable Diseases and Indian Council of Medical Research to discuss ways in case the virus seeps into Asian countries.

And after the meeting came to an end on Monday the government issued advisory.

It was decided in the meeting that a panel of two doctors each would minutely check all passengers coming to India from Mexico, US, Canada, France, New Zealand at six airports of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Goa for flu symptoms like fever and other symptoms to avert any health crisis later.

In addition to this, health officials have been asked to deploy doctors to individually check up all passengers at their homes who have come from Mexico in the last 10 days.

As of now, India has stock of 1 million doses of Tamiflu – the only medicine that could be effective, and it has been advised to set up four labs in Delhi, Pune, Kolkata and Dibrugarh to test suspected human samples of swine flu.

No less than 100 people in Mexico have reportedly been killed so far and about 1,500 have shown symptoms of flu infection. Twenty confirmed cases of swine flu have been detected in United States and the number is being expected to increase in coming days.

Fearing the outbreak could spread to other countries, WHO Director General Margaret Chan after consulting influenza experts had called the outbreak had “pandemic potential”. But her agency had said later that there was needed some more epidemiological evidence before raising its pandemic alert level.

Seeking some guidelines and advises, a meeting of international experts have been called on Tuesday to advise the World Health Organisation (WHO) whether to raise the current pandemic alert level.

The current pandemic alert level is 3 on a scale of 1 (low risk of human cases) to 6 (efficient, sustained transmission between humans).