Medical management critical,says Azad

It is after a gap of four months that he visited Pune,the epicentre of swine flu in the country. Pune’s Reeda Shaikh was India’s first swine flu fatality and till January,the district has seen 160 H1N1 deaths. Dr AC Mishra,director of NIV,told The Indian Express this was Azad’s first visit to the laboratory,during which he inspected the influenza section and other bio-safety laboratories.

“There is no significant reduction in the transmission rate of the virus,” Mishra said. The transmission of the H1N1 virus is actively going on in Pune and rural outskirts and studies are under way to test whether people have developed immunity towards the infection,he said. “However,for now,the only solution is to adhere to prompt and early treatment.”

According to the guidelines issued by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),Atlanta,safety level four (SL-4) is required for handling dangerous and exotic agents that pose a high individual risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections and life-threatening diseases. Mishra said the NIV plans to upgrade its Microbial Containment Complex (MCC) to bio-safety level 4 (BSL-4) to deal with highly-infectious pathogens.

Once this is implemented,the centre will be the only BSL-4 laboratory in south-east Asia,Mishra said,adding the health ministry has approved the plan. “The foundation stone has been laid and around Rs 30 crore will be invested to upgrade the MCC to BSL-4,” he said. The MCC,which is the national facility of Indian Council of Medical Research to handle high-risk micro-organisms,was set up two years ago.