virus alarm

New Delhi, April 27: India will introduce this week mandatory screening of select international passengers to bolster vigilance against a new, potentially lethal strain of swine flu that has emerged in North America and rekindled fears of a global pandemic.

The health ministry will deploy doctors at nine airports to screen passengers arriving from Mexico, the US, Canada, the UK, Spain, France and New Zealand — countries with confirmed or suspected cases of swine flu, health officials said today.

Vineet Chawdhury, joint secretary in the ministry of health, said the screening at the airports was expected to begin in another two days.

Public health authorities have also sought the assistance of immigration officials to track down and check the health of passengers who have arrived from these countries over the past 10 days, the officials said. The Centre has asked people to defer non-essential travel to the affected areas.

Mexico and the US have confirmed human cases of a previously unknown swine influenza virus, H1N1, but other countries are also investigating patients with flu-like symptoms.

Mexico today confirmed 149 deaths from H1N1.

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has confirmed 40 cases, but all patients had mild illness, with only one requiring brief hospitalisation.

Laboratory tests in the US have found that swine flu H1N1 is susceptible to the anti-viral drugs oseltamivir and zanamivir and the CDC has issued guidelines to use these drugs to treat the infection.

In India, the health ministry has asked all states to look out for clusters of unusual influenza-like illness. It has also decided to double its stocks of the anti-viral drug oseltamivir to two million doses.

The multiple outbreaks of bird flu in India over the past three years have helped improve the country’s state of preparedness, senior officials said.

“We’re better prepared today than we would have been five years ago,” joint secretary Chawdhury said.

About 32 additional doctors would be deployed at Delhi and Mumbai airports, and smaller numbers of medical staff at Bangalore, Calcutta, Chennai, Cochin, Goa, Hyderabad and Jaipur.

A public hospital in New Delhi has been earmarked to quarantine passengers suspected to be infected with the swine flu virus.

Laboratories in Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Dibrugarh and Vellore will have tools to diagnose H1N1, said Vishwa Mohan Katoch, director-general of the Indian Council of Medical Research.

Although the outbreaks have sparked fears about a flu pandemic such as the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 — which killed between 20 million and 100 million people worldwide — key questions about the H1N1 virus remain unanswered.

Researchers still don’t know why the virus appears to have caused deaths in Mexico, but not in the US. They also do not know how many people were actually infected in Mexico, and the possibility that a very large number of infected people had only mild symptoms has not yet been ruled out.

A senior US epidemiologist cautioned yesterday that it was premature to say the disease in Mexico was different from the one in the US. “We really need to prepare for the idea that we will have additional cases… and I do fear we will have deaths here,” said CDC official Anne Shuchat.